A new social media platform called Twitter.now has opened early access as its creators seek to establish an alternative to X, formerly known as Twitter, while a legal battle over the use of the Twitter brand continues.
Twitter.now was launched by startup Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes Stephen Coates, a former trademark counsel at the original Twitter. Early access to the platform is currently priced at $20 as the company tests its service ahead of a wider rollout.
Brandspur Brand News reports that the launch comes amid a year-long trademark dispute between Operation Bluebird and X. X has taken legal action in Delaware, seeking an injunction to prevent the startup from using the Twitter name for its social media platform.
Operation Bluebird has challenged that position, arguing before regulators that X abandoned trademarks including “Twitter” and “Tweet” following its 2023 rebranding.
The startup says Twitter.now is not intended to simply reproduce the social network that existed before Elon Musk’s takeover and the subsequent rebranding of Twitter as X. Instead, it is positioning the new service around trust, transparency and greater user control.
Coates said the company saw an opportunity to develop a different type of digital public square after X retired the Twitter brand. The platform’s central proposition is built around giving users more control over the type of content they encounter.
A key part of that strategy is VERA, an artificial intelligence system developed by Operation Bluebird. The company says the technology assesses posts, examines claims, provides context around the sources behind them and assigns content a trust score.
Users can then choose a preferred trust threshold, allowing them to filter their feeds based on the scores assigned by the system.
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The approach, however, faces the broader challenge of content moderation that has confronted social media platforms for years. As online communities grow, companies must balance user expression, misinformation, safety and moderation decisions at increasingly large scale.
Operation Bluebird says its initial moderation and trust framework is centred on the first version of VERA, with VERA 2.0 planned for the near future. The upgraded system is expected to give users the ability to restrict their feeds to posts meeting a trust level they select.
The future of Twitter.now will ultimately depend on whether it can attract users while navigating the legal dispute surrounding its name. Its ability to turn the trust-scoring concept into a reliable and widely accepted feature could also determine whether it develops into a serious competitor in the crowded social media market.
