A new social network called 'Twitter.now' is testing early access at $20

There’s a new social network called “Twitter.now” on the block, operated by a startup called Operation Bluebird, whose founding team includes former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates. As ArsTechnica reported, X sued the company last year and asked a Delaware judge to issue an injunction to stop Operation Bluebird from launching a social platform called Twitter. Operation Bluebird argued, per a petition filed last year, that X had let go of trademarks including “Twitter” and “Tweet.”

Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company isn’t trying to recreate Twitter. “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, adding that Twitter.now is a different service, with trust signals that give context for what users see and tools that let people — rather than an opaque algorithm — decide how much credibility and noise reach their feeds.

The site is currently in testing, with early access priced at $20. On its home page, the company says it uses an AI system called VERA that gauges posts, checks claims, shows users the source of claims and their context, and attaches a trust score; users will be able to set a preferred trust score to filter out low-trust posts.

All social networks struggle with moderation, though, and as user numbers grow, platforms often end up forced to choose sides — as the original Twitter did repeatedly before Elon Musk acquired it. Bluesky has also faced criticism over its moderation lately. Operation Bluebird told TechCrunch it aims to tackle moderation challenges with the VERA verification engine, currently in its initial version, and said a more capable “VERA 2.0” is on the near-term roadmap, letting users set their app to only show posts above a chosen trust threshold.

Why it matters

A trademark fight over the word “Twitter” is a reminder that abandoned brands don’t disappear cleanly — and a startup betting its identity on algorithmic trust scores will face the same moderation trade-offs that have dogged every social platform before it, regardless of what it calls its AI system.