Hold up, there’s a new Twitter in town

You read that right. There is a new social network called “Twitter.now” on the block, and it’s being 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 media platform called Twitter. But Operation Bluebird argued, per a petition last year, that X had let go of trademarks like “Twitter” and “Tweet.”

Coates said in a LinkedIn post that the company is not 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.

“Twitter.now is not an attempt to recreate the old platform. We are building a different service, with trust signals that provide context for what users see and tools that allow people—not an opaque algorithm—to decide how much credibility and noise reach their feeds.”

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

But all social networks struggle with moderation. As user numbers ramp up, platforms often find themselves being forced to choose sides, as the original Twitter had to do many times before it was acquired by Elon Musk. Bluesky has lately been criticized for its moderation, too.

Operation Bluebird told TechCrunch it aims to tackle moderation challenges using the VERA verification engine, which is in its initial version right now. “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.