American startup Operation Bluebird has launched the social network Twitter.now, which brings back the familiar name and blue bird from the "Domask" Twitter. However, Elon Musk's X Corp considers all these trademarks its own and is already suing the startup over their use.
American startup Operation Bluebird has launched the social network Twitter.now, which brings back the familiar name and blue bird from the "Domask" Twitter. However, Elon Musk's X Corp considers all these trademarks its own and is already suing the startup over their use.
This is reported by Ars Technica.
In addition, one of the leaders of Operation Bluebird, Stephen Coates, previously worked as a lawyer for Twitter. The X lawsuit also mentions the startup’s co-founder, Michael Peroff, an intellectual property specialist who once worked on Twitter’s trademarks.
In December 2025, Operation Bluebird filed a lawsuit with the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel a number of registrations related to Twitter. The startup argues that after switching to X, the company stopped using the old brand and showed no intention of returning to it.
X disagreed with this interpretation and sued Operation Bluebird. Musk's company insists that the rebranding does not mean an automatic abandonment of the trademark, and it continues to use the Twitter name and its derivatives, including in certain commercial materials and agreements.
There is no clear winner in this dispute. During a hearing in April, Judge Colm Connolly suggested that X’s position on the rights to the word tweet and the bird logo may not be so clear-cut. The Twitter brand itself remains in question. However, the court did not rule that Operation Bluebird would be free to use it.
However, Twitter.now is already in early access mode and has several hundred users. Registration is still paid: for $20 you can get Founder status, and a contribution of $40 or more gives you Fighter status. Operation Bluebird claims that the money will go, in particular, to developing the service and legal battles for the brand.
Outwardly, the service resembles the old Twitter. However, the startup wants to add its own VERA system — an automatic verification of “tweets” based on Gemini. It should assess the reliability of posts. The user will be able to determine which messages with which trust rating to see in the feed. This function has not yet been launched.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that X Corp achieved the closure of the open-source project Nitter, which allowed reading posts from the social network without registration and advertising.
