Even before the lawsuit has been decided, the new Twitter is open for business. The person in charge this time was not an outsider, but Twitter’s original legal chief, Stephen Coates. The new startup Operation Bluebird led by him chose a time when the judge had not yet made a ruling on the trademark lawsuit and directly launched the platform on the website Twitter.now.
The picture is a bit deliberately familiar: blue is the main color, and the signature bird returns, but this bird has a few more feathers, which can be regarded as a little distance from the old version. Coates told Ars Technica, "We've been waiting for months and we don't plan to wait any longer."
The key to daring to get ahead of the outcome of the lawsuit lies in the fact that after Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he quickly changed its name to X and changed its trademark and icon. According to Operation Bluebird, this action is tantamount to voluntarily giving up the trademark rights of Twitter and tweet, and the existence of the new platform is therefore tenable. Musk sued through a federal judge in Delaware, a state that has always been considered friendly to large companies.
The case is still under trial, but the preliminary ruling in April this year by District Court Judge Colm Connolly, who is presiding over the case, has already revealed the direction of the wind - he said that he did not "find credible evidence that X proposed the use of the word tweet or the bird trademark." Coates read this sentence as a green light, "We believe that X has given up its rights to Twitter and the tweet trademark," he said.
Xinzhan deliberately distanced itself from the relationship in its brand narrative, stating that it has "nothing to do with X Corp." Coates put it more bluntly on LinkedIn: "The public square is reopened, and it has absolutely nothing to do with
This "better model" is embodied in a set of AI tools called Vera, whose full name is "real-time truth verification engine", which will automatically fact-check each post. The intention is good, but the execution is still in the running-in period. Gaming media person Jeff Gerstmann registered an account and posted a harmless post about "Star Wars Zero Company". As a result, Vera directly judged it to be intercepted, and the entire content disappeared from all updates. He described the AI as having "no idea what it was doing."
Compared with AI losing its temper, the more realistic threshold is money. Joining Twitter.now currently requires a one-time payment of $20 to obtain "founding user" status. The platform's statement is to "block bots and maintain independence." There is a payment threshold to prove that there is a real person behind the account. Converted, this price is half of the single monthly subscription fee of X Premium+. The platform also stated that it would be "open to more people" in the future, but did not specify whether a free version would be launched.
