You read that correctly. A new social network called “Twitter.now” has entered the scene, and it’s being run by a startup called Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes former Twitter trademark attorney Stephen Coates.
As Ars Technica reported, X sued the company last year, asking a Delaware judge to block Operation Bluebird from launching a social media platform under the Twitter name. Operation Bluebird, however, argued in a petition filed last year that X had abandoned trademarks associated with “Twitter” and “Tweet.”
Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company isn’t trying to bring back the original Twitter. Instead, he said, the team saw an opening after X Corp. retired the Twitter brand and wanted to create something new centered on trust, transparency, and giving users more control.
“Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform,” Coates said. The company instead wants to build a different kind of service, using trust signals to give users more context about what appears in their feeds and tools that let people, rather than an opaque algorithm, determine how much credibility and noise they want to see.
The platform is currently being tested, with early access priced at $20. According to its homepage, the company is using an AI-powered system called VERA to evaluate posts, verify claims, identify their sources, provide additional context, and assign each post a trust score. Users will eventually be able to choose their preferred trust threshold and filter out posts that fall below it.
Still, moderation remains one of the biggest challenges facing every social network. As platforms grow, they frequently have to make difficult decisions about what content is allowed, a problem the original Twitter encountered repeatedly before Elon Musk acquired it. Bluesky has also faced criticism over its approach to moderation.
Operation Bluebird told TechCrunch that it intends to address these challenges through its VERA verification engine, which is currently in its first version. The company said VERA 2.0 is already on its near-term roadmap and will offer expanded capabilities, including allowing users to configure their feeds to display only posts that meet a trust-score threshold they choose.
