Flagged On My First Post, Is It Normal? Or Am I Doing Something Wrong?

Hi everyone, I am a new member of the site and had just put my introductory blog up yesterday. Woke up this morning to a ton of "flags" on every comment I made thanking people who welcomed me on board. Though the accounts which flagged me, called iloveupvotes and livemoral, have also commented below me with strange messages, I still do not understand why the negative vote.

At first I was confused to see some text in red which read "Comments were hidden due to low ratings" with a button at the end of my blog which reads "Show". On clicking this button, I was presented with a number of comments which were grayed out and had to be revealed to be seen. The comments in those were a link to another blog and random bits of words which gave me the feeling that I was embroiled/entered into some sort of war.

Is this behaviour normal on steemit? Or have I been dragged into something inadvertently as on trying to understand I get the impression that there are two sides who differ bitterly on certain areas of usage of the site. This is all confusing for me as I was seduced into this by talks of it being a censorship free world where you can voice your concerns without fear of persecution, but now I am in the middle of a stack of "grayed out" and "hidden" stuff, which sounds and feels a lot like censorship.

But the impression I get from these comments is the fact that someone is trying to bring notice of persecution, or some form of censorship. As I have mentioned in my introduction, I am an investigative journalist and it was but natural for me to investigate, but after wading through countless posts which came up when I searched for "flags", I am astounded that there has been so much debate about the "unfairness" of the system and the use of money power on the site, and it seems I have walked into one!

I have reported on crime for two decades now and have seen how blatant power and money manipulate and dictate what happens in the real world, so should I be worried that it is the same on here? I ask this question as a newcomer without any malice and as a matter of curiosity, because I am still confused why I was chosen to have my comments flagged, and that too, in my first post!

Thank you.