Twitter.now Launches as Former Twitter Lawyer Challenges X
The launch follows a preliminary court ruling that X appears to have abandoned its intellectual property claims to the Twitter name, giving Coates a legal opening to revive the brand.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Stephen Coates, a former Twitter lawyer, launched Twitter.now on August 27, 2026. The new social network charges $20 for founding membership and $40 for a Fighter status, with fees funding his trademark fight against X. A judge's preliminary ruling suggested X may have abandoned claims to the Twitter brand.
Twitter.now is live, built by Stephen Coates, the former Twitter lawyer who has spent months trying to cancel X's trademarks on the Twitter and Tweet names. The site resembles the old Twitter, with reply and retweet functions, and adds an automatic fact-checking tool called Vera, which uses Gemini to check the reliability of posted information.
Coates frames the project as a public square organized around trust, transparency, and user choice. Founding members pay $20 for early access, a numbered badge, and a desired handle. A $40 Fighter tier adds a badge of a bird holding a slingshot, and the site lists the fight against X as one of its goals, explaining that the fee funds that fight.
The launch follows an April 2026 hearing where District Court Judge Colm Connolly issued a preliminary ruling that X appears to have abandoned its claims to the word Tweet, the bird logo, and possibly the word Twitter. No formal written order has been issued. Twitter.now had only a few hundred users at the time of writing.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.
Sources
- GIGAZINE 「Twitter」がリリースされる