“Operation Bluebird, Inc. picked up the name X Corp. walked away from and is rebuilding it on trust, in your browser at twitter.now,” it states prominently on its website. “We are not X, and we are not affiliated with X Corp.”

Neither the X Corporation, nor Elon Musk, nor Andrew Mayo, one of X’s attorneys, immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

Twitter.now, still in its nascent stage, only has hundreds of users for the time being. The social media network looks and feels much like the Twitter of old and many of its offshoots—it has replies and retweets.

Fact-checking feature

A new and notable feature is the automated fact-checking tool, a Gemini-based “veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short), which runs on every tweet.

Coates has been testing Vera in recent days by posting obviously false messages, like “George Washington was our second president.”

“Our first goal is to see if we can truly bring back a town square that’s safer and less harmful,” he said.

“We say freedom of speech and not freedom of reach. We want people to say what they want, but we also want to create a platform that’s not financially locked into that viral content that’s harmful or inaccurate.”

Josh Gerben, a Washington, DC-based trademark attorney who has been closely following this case, told Ars that while Operation Bluebird may have a “workable legal theory” that X Corporation has abandoned the Twitter trademark, it’s not an open-and-shut case.

“I would say that there’s an element of chutzpah to do this, and they’re going to get the best fight that X has,” he said.

“It was one thing to file the trademark application; now that they’ve launched, there will be another response from [X Corporation],” he said. “They’ve really upped the ante now. It’s a really interesting escalation of the case. Go put another round of popcorn in the microwave!”