South Africa, Sept. 1 -- Twitter trademark Stephen Coates, who served as Twitter's first trademark counsel and later held senior legal roles at the company, is behind Operation Bluebird, the startup that launched Twitter.now in late August. The platform is currently in early testing, with the company positioning it not simply as a recreation of Twitter, but as an attempt to rethink how social media moderation works.

The timing is deliberate. When Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, he eventually replaced the company's name and branding with X, retiring the blue bird and much of the vocabulary associated with the platform. Operation Bluebird argues that in abandoning the Twitter identity, X also abandoned trademark rights associated with names...