Banned again — this time for 'Space Force' and 'discombobulater.' Meanwhile 'Rot in Hell you unAmerican scum' stays up. Twice in 24 hours.

Less than 24 hours ago X locked me for a parody. Now they've locked me again — this time for using the words "Space Force" and "discombobulater" in a tweet under a video about the Biden DOJ taking my kids.

I am not making that up. The receipts are below.

What I actually posted

I posted a video on May 21 titled "This is what a Weaponized Biden DOJ looks like." Caption on the video: "took my kids." It hit 311,000 views.

Under that grief post, a verified leftist account (@garykoepnick — #PROCHOICE #LGBTQ+ ally in the bio) showed up to attack me. I had already blocked him for prior harassment, so I literally cannot see what he wrote — X just shows me "This Post is from an account you blocked." I replied:

You are the worst America has to offer. Steal another election and see what happens.

A third leftist account, @LoriNash59 (bio: "Blue dot in a red state hoping dignity, sanity and statesmanship will return to the White House after tRump is gone"), saw an opportunity and jumped in with a one-line setup:

Is that a threat?

That is what's called fishing for a reportable line. It's a classic trap. You bait the target into giving a one-word answer that, when ripped out of context by an automated moderation system, looks like an admission.

So I answered her. Sarcastically. And obviously.

Yes. Steal another election, and see what doesn't happen to you? Did you not just watch what happened to Maduro? Did you not just see the discombobulater? Delta force, and space force will take care of you. I don't have to do anything. I'm gonna be too busy on my yacht with your tax money paying for it to worry about you.

I am a private citizen in Longview, Texas. I do not command Delta Force. I do not command Space Force. Space Force has nothing to do with domestic election integrity — they fly satellites. I don't own a yacht. The word "discombobulater" isn't even a real word.

The entire reply is, on its face, obvious political sarcasm. It is a Trump-style riff. Anyone who has spent two minutes on the right side of the internet in the last decade recognizes the cadence. There is no time, no place, no means, no named victim, and no instruction to anyone to do anything. It is the rhetorical equivalent of saying "the Avengers will get you."

What X did about it

X's automated system locked my account for "Violent Speech."

For "Space Force" and "discombobulater."

Which means the reports went in faster than any human could read them — which means the lock is the product of coordinated mass-reporting, not the actual content of the tweet. This is the second time in 24 hours that the same pattern has played out on my account. Yesterday it was a verified blue-check (@theliamnissan) who literally wrote, on the platform, "I'm just casually getting your account banned" — and within an hour I was locked. (Full case file on that one: Banned from X for a parody.)

What X did NOT do anything about

Here is what X allowed to stay up — in the same thread, against me, on the same day, from accounts I have never bothered to report:

@LoriNash59 — the same person who asked "Is that a threat?" — replied to me a few minutes later:

Rot in Hell you unAmerican scum.

That tweet is still up. No lock. No "Violent Speech" warning. No automated review. She set the trap, fired the report, then in the open thread said the actual hateful thing.

@DrMLynne replied:

You took part in January 6, you deserve life in prison.

Still up. (For reference: I was pardoned by the President of the United States on January 20, 2025. The charges against me were dismissed with prejudice. "You deserve life in prison" is wishing the death of a free citizen.)

@hec_nasty under a separate post:

Lame ass bitch.

@Teddy_four under another:

Nobody cares phaggot.

A homophobic slur. Still up.

Yesterday's brigade caller @theliamnissan, ~460,000 followers, verified, used my reply as a recruiting flare for "#smokefleet show him some love" and then wrote in plain English that he was getting my account banned. Still up. Still verified.

I am not asking X to remove those replies. I'm a grown man, I can take an insult. I'm pointing out the asymmetry: the slurs and "rot in hell" calls stay up. My Space Force joke gets the account locked.

I have the audio. Listen for yourself.

I recorded my reaction in real time so this isn't a he-said/she-said. You can hear, in my own voice, the context this lock was pulled out of:

Listen to the recording on Google Drive →

If the link asks for permission, that's on the Drive sharing settings — I'll fix it as soon as I'm back at a keyboard.

Why this is happening

This is what platform censorship looks like when the moderation system is report-count-driven instead of content-driven. A coordinated group of accounts can target one user, fire the same report over and over, and the automation does the rest. The author of the most heinous reply in your mentions stays up. You — the one quoting Genesis in your bio — get the lock.

Elon Musk bought X promising free speech. What I am experiencing in real time, in two consecutive days, is the exact opposite: selective, asymmetric, weaponized enforcement. Conservatives keep getting told this isn't happening anymore. It's happening. To me. Right now. Twice in 24 hours.

I am writing this on my own website. On my own server. On my own domain. No one can lock this post. That is by design.

On building an open social platform that no one can ban

Several people have asked me whether it's possible to build the kind of thing X used to be — but open, owned by the people on it, mass-built together, where one CEO's mood swing can't silence anyone. The answer is yes, and the tools already exist.

The shortlist of the three serious open-source approaches:

1. ActivityPub / Mastodon / the Fediverse. Everyone runs their own server, the servers federate, your account moves with you. Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and Threads (Meta's product) all speak ActivityPub. If one server kicks you off, you spin up another and the network still talks to you. Open source, mature, free.
2. AT Protocol / Bluesky. Newer, designed from day one around "your identity is portable, your data is yours, the algorithm is yours to choose." Bluesky is the reference app. The protocol itself is open — anyone can build a competing app on the same network.
3. Nostr. Simpler still. Your identity is just a cryptographic key you control. Posts are signed by that key and relayed by anyone who wants to relay them. No central server can ban you because there is no central server. Heavy adoption among the Bitcoin community.

A real "plug into the same network and mass-populate together" play would look like this:

• Stand up a Mastodon instance under social.realryannichols.com — gives me my own server I cannot be kicked off of, fully interoperable with millions of accounts already on the Fediverse.
• Stand up a Bluesky PDS under bsky.realryannichols.com for the people who prefer that UX, with the same handle moving with you.
• Use this site (realryannichols.com) as the canonical archive. Every post here gets cross-posted via ActivityPub to Mastodon, signed and rebroadcast through Nostr relays, and mirrored to Bluesky. You can't silence a message that is published in four places at once and indexed by anyone with a browser.
• Open the source code on GitHub so anyone who agrees with the mission can fork it, fix it, deploy it, and run a node. That is the "mass plug into the open code" part — a Linux of social media, not a Twitter.

I am going to start building toward this now. Not next quarter. Not after a fundraising round. Now. This second X lock just pushed it from "someday" to "this week." I'll post the spec and the first commits here as I go.

If you want in — as a builder, a writer, a node operator, a moderator-of-your-own-server, or a donor — keep an eye on this feed. I'll publish the plan.

What I'm not going to do

I'm not going to retaliate-report. I'm not going to brigade anyone. I'm not going to ask my followers to mass-report Lori or anyone else. That's the exact behavior being used against me — and the only way to beat it is to refuse to do it back.

I'm going to stay calm. I'm going to publish receipts. I'm going to build my own house.

Genesis 50:20

"You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive."

Every time a leftist account brigades me into a lock, the algorithm hands me the gift of a thousand new reasons to build my own platform — and a thousand new readers come over here to read about it. The trap they set keeps becoming the launchpad.

I didn't ask for this fight. I'm not running from it either.

— Ryan

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Posted from realryannichols.com — my own website, my own domain, my own server. No mass-reporting button works here.