X Corp. sued to block the name "Twitter." A startup launched Twitter.now anyway.

A social network called Twitter.now opened for testing on August 26, 2026, and early access costs $20. The site is run by a startup called Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes Stephen Coates, a former Twitter trademark counsel, TechCrunch reported on August 27, 2026. What is not settled is whether the startup gets to keep the name.

That is the part worth watching. A question nobody in the technology business has had to answer before is now in front of a court: whether a company can lose the best-known name on the internet by walking away from it.

What the court has and has not done

X Corp. sued Operation Bluebird last year and asked a Delaware judge to issue an injunction stopping it from launching a social platform called Twitter, TechCrunch reported, crediting ArsTechnica's earlier account. Operation Bluebird argued in a petition last year that X had let go of trademarks including “Twitter” and “Tweet,” according to the same report.

At a hearing in April 2026, the Delaware judge in the case, Colm Connolly, asked from the bench whether X abandoned the Twitter and tweet marks after the 2023 rebrand, Gadget Review reported. A question from the bench decides nothing. There is no written ruling, and the abandonment argument remains Operation Bluebird's contention, not a finding. The site launched with roughly 100 users, the outlet reported.

What the product is

Twitter.now is a rebuilt classic-style timeline with replies and retweets, plus a layer called Vera that runs on Google's Gemini. Vera gauges posts, checks claims, shows users the source of a claim and its context, and attaches a trust score, per the company's home page as described by TechCrunch. Users set a preferred trust score to filter out low-trust posts. The design choice is scoring rather than removal.

Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company is not rebuilding the old service. “When X Corp. retired the Twitter brand, we saw an opportunity to build something new: a public square organized around trust, transparency, and user choice,” he said, per TechCrunch.

The moderation problem it inherits

Every social network eventually has to take sides, TechCrunch noted, as the original Twitter did repeatedly before Elon Musk acquired it, and as Bluesky has been criticized for lately. Operation Bluebird told TechCrunch it intends to handle that with the Vera verification engine, which is in its first version. “VERA 2.0, with expanded capabilities, is on the near-term roadmap, where the user will be able to set their app to only see posts above the threshold they choose,” the company said in an emailed statement to the outlet.

In testing since August 26, 2026, at $20 for early access. Version 2.0, the company says, is on the near-term roadmap.

Several things are not known from the available record. There is no date for a ruling from the Delaware court, no public account of how X Corp. answered the abandonment argument at the April hearing, and no indication of how long the $20 early-access price holds or what the service costs after testing. A roughly 100-user launch is also not a test of any moderation system, whatever it is called.

Source: techcrunch.com, retrieved August 27, 2026.