Abstract:
Operation Bluebird, a Virginia-based startup company in the United States, recently announced that its new social media platform Twitter.now is officially launched. The company believes that after Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to
Stephen Coates, co-founder of Operation Bluebird, said the company has been waiting for months and has no plans to delay the product launch. He served as the platform's legal head before Musk acquired Twitter and now serves as the new Twitter's general counsel.
However, the plan is facing legal challenges. Musk's X Corp. sued Operation Bluebird at the end of last year and requested a preliminary injunction from the federal court in Delaware to prevent the new version of Twitter from going online. X Corp. believes that Operation Bluebird's use of the Twitter brand may constitute trademark infringement and cause market confusion.
In April this year, U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly made a tendentious oral statement during the trial, believing that However, the court has yet to issue a formal written ruling on this.
Coates said the judge's oral opinion was enough for the company to decide to move forward. "We believe that X has given up its rights to Twitter and the tweet trademark," he said.
In order to avoid being viewed as a continuation of the old Twitter or The company also made it clear that it is not X and has no relationship with X Corp.
So far, X Corp., Musk and their attorneys have not responded to this matter.
Twitter.now, which has just been launched, is still in its early stages and currently has only a few hundred users. In terms of functionality and interface, the platform is similar to Twitter in its early years and its many alternatives, providing social functions such as replying and forwarding.
The main difference is the introduction of an automated fact-checking feature. The feature, called Vera, is defined as a "real-time analysis authenticity engine" based on the Google Gemini model, which can analyze every post on the platform. Coates recently tested the system by posting blatantly false information such as "George Washington was the second president of the United States."
Coates said that the primary goal of the new platform is to rebuild a "safer and less harmful" public discussion space. He said that the platform's insistence on freedom of speech does not mean that harmful or inaccurate information has unlimited dissemination capabilities; its philosophy is "freedom of speech, not freedom of communication" and hopes to avoid a business model that relies too much on the viral spread of inflammatory, harmful or untrue content.
Josh Gerben, a Washington trademark attorney who has long followed the case, said Operation Bluebird's argument that X had abandoned the Twitter trademark was "not without merit," but the outcome of the case was far from clear. He believes that submitting a trademark application is one thing, but officially launching the service will further escalate the dispute between the two parties, and X Corp. is likely to respond more strongly.
With the launch of Twitter.now, the dispute over the ownership of the Twitter name, Bluebird logo and historical brand assets has entered a new stage.
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