Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it as X less than a year later. A startup named Operation Bluebird believes this rebrand means Musk abandoned the Twitter trademark, and the company is planning to launch its own version of Twitter based on that claim.
Stephen Coates, the trademark lawyer behind Operation Bluebird, announced in a LinkedIn post that the new site, Twitter.now, had launched. The launch hasn’t been without issues, though, as of Thursday morning, the site was down and inaccessible for some users.
Coates explained the vision for the platform in his announcement, stating that the service is not intended to be a recreation of the old platform but rather a different service focused on providing context and user-controlled credibility tools.
“Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform,” Coates said in his post announcing the launch. “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.”
The new platform operates on a paid model for early access. According to The Register, the new Twitter asks users to pay $20 to gain early access to the platform as a founder. There is also an option to pay $40 or more to gain access in the “Fighter tier,” which includes a special badge on the user’s profile.
Both Coates and Operation Bluebird have explicitly noted that the new platform is not associated with Musk’s X Corp. or Twitter, Inc. An FAQ page listed on Twitter.new, a separate domain launched late last year for people to claim handles, reinforces this, stating that the company is independent and not affiliated with the previous ownership.
The legal future of this venture remains uncertain. The company filed to claim the Twitter trademark last year, but Musk’s X Corp. quickly filed a lawsuit to challenge the claim. In its filing, the company asserted that the brand was still in use. “Twitter never left and continues to be exclusively owned by X Corp.,” the company said.
The judge overseeing the trademark dispute ruled that X Corp. still holds the trademark for “Twitter,” but not for the word “tweet” or the bird logo. Following that decision, Operation Bluebird rebranded and moved its platform to Tweet.App, as reported by Ars Technica.
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