Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup trying to revive the “Twitter” name and logo, said it has launched its new social media network, Twitter.now.
“We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product,” Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird’s cofounders, told Ars Technica. “And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore.”
According to a report by Ars Technica, Operation Bluebird believes that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company’s name to X, the Twitter identity and intellectual property were abandoned. However, Musk’s X Corporation quickly sued Operation Bluebird late last year and asked a federal judge in Delaware to issue a preliminary injunction to prevent a new version of Twitter from launching.
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However, in an April 2026 hearing, District Court Judge Colm Connolly gave a tentative ruling from the bench that X appeared to have given up intellectual property claims over the word “tweet” and the Twitter bird logo — and possibly even the word “Twitter.” However, the judge has yet to issue a written order.
Coates said 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,” he said.
Twitter.now is currently in testing, and early access costs $20. The company says on its home page that it is using an AI system called VERA that gauges posts, checks claims, gives users the source of the claims and context, and attaches a trust score. Users will be able to set their preferred trust score to filter out low-trust posts.
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Operation Bluebird told TechCrunch it aims to tackle moderation challenges using the VERA verification engine, which is currently in its initial version. “VERA 2.0, with expanded capabilities, is on the near-term roadmap, where the user will be able to set their app to only see posts above the threshold they choose,” it said in a statement.
Josh Gerben, a Washington, D.C.-based trademark attorney who has been closely following the case, told Ars that while Operation Bluebird may have a “workable legal theory” that X Corporation has abandoned the Twitter trademark, it is not an open-and-shut case.
“I would say that there’s an element of chutzpah to do this, and they’re going to get the best fight that X has,” he said.
“It was one thing to file the trademark application; now that they’ve launched, there will be another response from [X Corporation],” he said. “They’ve really upped the ante now. It’s a really interesting escalation of the case. Go put another round of popcorn in the microwave!”