Free The Bluebird

Cyrus Farivar writes for Ars Technica about a startup company that wants to reclaim the Twitter brand from the clutches of Elon Musk. Called Operation Bluebird, the company has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office on the premise that X Corporation has abandoned it.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. He eventually changed the company name and brand identity from Twitter to X. That decision, Operation Bluebird says, created an opening for the Twitter name to be formally abandoned. In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that “we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.”

As eager as Musk was to shed the old branding, you would think X Corporation would be happy to have it picked up. Not so.

X filed suit against Operation Bluebird for trademark infringement. Of course, experts say that X could have just defended the trademark against cancellation, but that wouldn’t be nearly as on-brand as a lawsuit.

At this point, I feel like we should all let Twitter go. It was bought and destroyed. There’s no point in resurrecting its decomposed carcass.

What disappoints me most is that it seems many who abandoned X at the height of Elon Musk’s folly have now gone back. Just a year ago, I wrote about the exodus of some prominent names, such as Russell Moore of Christianty Today. At the time, he was delighted with the atmosphere on Bluesky, so I was surprised to see his recent rebuttal of the president’s reaction to Rob Reiner’s death on X. It seems Moore is not the only one to denounce the service and then go back. I still can’t understand the appeal of X over Bluesky, though, which has reached a level of near feature parity.