Hold Up, There’s a New Twitter in Town

A new social network called Twitter.now has emerged, operated by a startup called Operation Bluebird, and its founding team includes former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates.

The move comes after X Corp., the company formerly known as Twitter, sued Operation Bluebird last year. X asked a Delaware judge to issue an injunction to stop the startup from launching a social media platform called Twitter. But Operation Bluebird argued, per a petition filed last year, that X had effectively let go of trademarks like “Twitter” and “Tweet” when it rebranded to X.

Coates addressed the situation in a LinkedIn post, stating that the company is not trying to recreate the old Twitter. “When X Corp. retired the Twitter brand, we saw an opportunity to build something new: a public square organized around trust, transparency, and user choice,” he said.

A Different Approach to Social Media

Operation Bluebird is positioning Twitter.now as a fundamentally different service from its namesake predecessor. “Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform. We are building a different service, with trust signals that provide context for what users see and tools that allow people, not an opaque algorithm, to decide how much credibility and noise reach their feeds,” Coates explained.

The site is currently in testing, with early access priced at $20. The platform’s key differentiator is an AI system called VERA (Verification Engine) that gauges posts, checks claims, gives users the source of the claims, provides context, and attaches a trust score. Users will be able to set their preferred trust score to filter out low trust posts.

The Challenge of Moderation

All social networks struggle with moderation, and Twitter.now is no exception. As user numbers ramp up, platforms often find themselves forced to choose sides, as the original Twitter had to do many times before it was acquired by Elon Musk. Bluesky has recently faced similar criticism for its moderation approach.

Operation Bluebird acknowledges this challenge and aims to tackle it using the VERA verification engine. The company told TechCrunch that VERA 2.0, with expanded capabilities, is on the near term roadmap. This upgrade will allow users to set their app to only see posts above the threshold they choose, giving individuals more control over their feed content.

What This Means for the Social Media Landscape

Twitter.now enters a crowded and fragmented social media market where many former Twitter users have scattered to platforms like Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon. The platform’s focus on trust scores and user controlled filtering represents a different approach to content moderation, one that attempts to address concerns about algorithmic opacity and misinformation.

However, significant challenges remain. Building a successful social network requires achieving critical mass of users, managing content moderation at scale, and developing sustainable business models. Whether Twitter.now can overcome these hurdles and carve out a meaningful space in the social media ecosystem remains to be seen.

For now, the platform’s ability to use the Twitter name, despite X Corp.’s legal objections, adds an intriguing layer to its story. The involvement of a former Twitter trademark counsel in the venture further complicates the narrative, making Twitter.now one of the more unusual social media launches in recent memory.

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