Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the supposedly abandoned name and logo of "Twitter," announced Monday the launch of its new social network: Twitter.now.
"We're a small company, we have investors, and we have a product," Coates told the tech publication Ars Technica, referring to the launch of twitter.now, which comes after several months of waiting.
As Ars reported in December 2025, Coates and his group believe that when Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and quickly changed the company's name to X, Twitter's identity and intellectual property were abandoned.
They claim that Musk's decision created an opportunity for Operation Bluebird to claim Twitter's trademarks.
Operation Bluebird co-founder Stephen Coates launched the service following a preliminary ruling by a federal judge in April 2026, which indicated that X Corp. appeared to have relinquished intellectual property rights to 'Twitter', 'tweet', and the platform's iconic bird logo.
What twitter.now offers: VERA, classic feed, and paid memberships
The product, which is already live, replicates the visual architecture of classic Twitter. Upon entering twitter.now, it explicitly states below the logo that it is "not affiliated with X." The interface brings back the side panel with the feed, Explore, and notifications; a central composer for writing tweets; and a panel on the right with custom trends.
The most distinctive feature is VERA, an automated fact-checking tool based on Gemini, Google's AI model, which runs on every tweet posted to the platform. Coates explains it this way: "We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that isn't financially tied to that harmful or inaccurate viral content."
The launch of twitter.now comes at a time when the text-based social media market coexists with established alternatives like Bluesky and Threads (Meta), platforms that captured a significant portion of the users who left Twitter during 2024 and 2025. While specific market share figures are unavailable in this article, what is clear is that Operation Bluebird's offering doesn't compete on the same playing field: its main strength lies not in its algorithm or community size, but in its ownership of the original brand and automated fact-checking of every post.
