A former Twitter trademark lawyer has launched a social network with a familiar name.
Stephen Coates’ startup, Operation Bluebird, launched Twitter.now in early testing on Thursday. Coates, formerly Twitter’s head counsel for trademarks, domain names, and marketing, told Business Insider that the platform is experimenting with a twist on content moderation: Users, rather than the company’s central algorithm, will decide how much potentially false or harmful material reaches their feeds.
“We’re going to use the phrase ‘freedom of speech and not freedom of reach,'” Coates said. “That freedom allows you to express yourself in the manner you choose as long as it’s lawful, and that doesn’t always ensure that you’re going to get reach based on that content.”
Coates said that the new platform’s VERA AI system is designed to assess posts, verify claims, provide sources and context, and assign a trust score to content. A future version is aiming to let users choose a minimum score, filtering posts that fall below their preferred threshold.
Coates said that, for example, when a political leader makes false statements, a user could configure the platform to remove those claims from their feed without the platform banning the politician.
“We’re empowering those users to be able to decide what level of harmful or adult or untruthful content they want in their feed,” Coates said.
Coates summed up the idea colorfully: Twitter.now would permit someone to “scream obscenities at the children,” but give users tools to ensure “the children won’t hear it.”
Twitter.now is entering a market filled with would-be X rivals, all facing a moderation problem no social network has solved cleanly. Bluesky, seen as a major alternative to X, has faced its own moderation-related criticism. Many studies have also shown that engagement-driven algorithms reward outrage and sensationalism.
“It’s a grand experiment, and I don’t know if we have sights to be bigger than X,” Coates said. “But I think we want to build a better mousetrap and see if people will come.”
Since buying Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has loosened some of the platform’s earlier moderation practices and reinstated previously banned users, including Donald Trump. Musk also announced a “general amnesty” for suspended accounts that had not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam, following a poll of users on the proposal.
The fight over who owns ‘Twitter’
Coates said that the startup’s core executive team has eight people, supplemented by contractors. For now, the service remains a limited web app with only a few hundred users. $20 buys a new user early access and a shot at claiming a preferred handle.
Coates left his position at Twitter in 2016 and spent the next few years as a senior counsel for Amazon.
A considerable trademark uncertainty, however, has been keeping Twitter.now off app stores. X sued Operation Bluebird last year, accusing it of trademark and copyright infringement, and asked the District Court for the District of Delaware to block the launch. Operation Bluebird has argued that X abandoned its trademarks, including “Twitter” and “tweet,” after Musk renamed the platform.
An oral finding by Colm F. Connolly, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Delaware, at an April hearing said that X did not provide sufficient evidence to show rights over the bird logo and “tweet” mark, but the court has not issued a written decision on X’s request for an injunction.
“I am going to tell you I’m going to make one finding, which is I have not found that X has adduced credible evidence of use of ‘tweet or the bird logo,” said Connolly. “And I mean, I gave it every opportunity.”
“And I’m undecided about use of ‘Twitter.’ That’s what I think I would benefit from further briefing on,” Connolly added.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
