A startup called Operation Bluebird has opened early access to a new social media platform named Twitter.now, stepping into a space long dominated by X even as the two companies remain locked in a legal dispute over who has the right to use the Twitter name.
The platform is currently in a testing phase, with early access priced at $20. Operation Bluebird’s founding team includes Stephen Coates, a former trademark counsel at the original Twitter.
The launch follows a year-long legal battle between the two companies as X promptly filed a lawsuit against Operation Bl uebird in a Delaware court, seeking an injunction to block the startup from using the Twitter brand for a new platform. Operation Bluebird, on their part, petitioned regulators by arguing that X had abandoned trademarks including “Twitter” and “Tweet” after rebranding in 2023.
In a LinkedIn post, Coates said the new platform is not an attempt 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 wrote, adding that the goal is a different kind of service built around user-controlled trust signals rather than an opaque algorithm.
Central to that pitch is an artificial intelligence system called VERA, which the company says evaluates posts, checks claims, surfaces the source of a claim’s underlying context, and assigns each post a trust score. Users can set a preferred threshold to filter out content the system rates as low-trust.
Moderation remains an open question for the young platform. Social networks have historically struggled to stay neutral as their user bases grow, a pattern that shaped Twitter’s own history before Musk’s takeover and that has more recently drawn criticism toward rival platform Bluesky over its handling of content moderation.
Responding to questions about how it plans to manage moderation at scale, Operation Bluebird said its approach rests on the VERA system, which is still in its first version. The company said a more advanced version, VERA 2.0, is planned for the near term and would let users restrict their feeds to only posts above a trust threshold they set themselves.
Whether Twitter.now will grow into a viable alternative to X may depend as much on the outcome of the ongoing trademark dispute as on user adoption of its trust-scoring system.
