In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that “we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.”
That was when Peroff, a Chicago-area attorney specializing in trademark and IP law, saw an opportunity not only to claim the name Twitter but also to use the iconic illustrated logo that was affectionately referred to internally as “Larry Bird.”
Peroff and others began formally organizing Operation Bluebird, a way to bring back Twitter in name, services, and format, catering in particular to commercial brands.
Some corporations have been reluctant to advertise on X for fear that they will be associated with unsavory content, such as extremist views, scam-like posts, or pornbots. In September 2024, Kantar Marketplace, a market research firm, put out a study noting that 26 percent of surveyed marketers planned to abandon their ad campaigns on X.
“We think our moderation tools will help the discussion evolve into something more responsible,” Peroff said. “Brands are stuck on X because they have no other place to go.”
While Threads, which is owned by Meta, began testing ads earlier this year, only recently did it reach the scale—around 400 million monthly active users—that Twitter had at the time of its acquisition by Musk. Neither Mastodon nor Bluesky have any advertising for the time being.
Mark Lemley, a Stanford Law professor and expert in trademark law, told Ars that X might be able to defend the Twitter marks if it can show that it is still using them.
“Mere ‘token use’ won’t be enough to reserve the mark,” Lemley wrote in an email. “Or [X] could defend if it can show that it plans to go back to using Twitter. Consumers obviously still know the brand name. It seems weird to think someone else could grab the name when consumers still associate it with the ex-social media site of that name. But that’s what the law says.”
Mark Jaffe, an intellectual property attorney in California who is not involved in the case, thinks that X Corporation may have a battle to keep the Twitter marks.
“Once it’s no longer prominent on the website and the owner, the CEO, says it’s now called this and not that,” he told Ars, “I don’t know how you beat an abandonment argument.”
