you just gotta downvote somebody for being an asshole and if they are actually an asshole than usually the huge amount of downvotes defangs someone’s ability to claim their viewpoint is held by some exaggerated significant portion of the community.
The issues is that the asshole is going to downvote you back, and will bring his ten alts to make sure your comment is buried into oblivion. Downvotes can be identified by admins with the current version of Lemmy, but that's a new can of worms (and work for the admins)
My main account is now on Reddthat, which disables downvotes, and I can tell you I don't use my other accounts to downvote people.
But yes, you could potentially use my case as an example, other people might do it, and use them as I said.