Decision from the judge "Issuance of the injunction precluding Bluebird's use of the Twitter-formative marks is contingent on X Corp.'s posting of a $500,000 bond."
Both X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.
The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name. So the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
I never went (just don't like it), but for a long time it was a primary source for a lot of important things so one kinda gets exposed to it anyway indirectly and / or through embeds. But that's the filtered version, anyway.
Some years ago I spent too much time on Reddit. A shockingly large number of subs were like 50% or more just screenshots of tweets. And I’m not even talking about the twitter themed subs.
You could scroll through the front page and a significant number of posts were just twitter reposts (or doctored ones).
It’s like these social media beasts are in an endless loop of eating each others vomit and puking it back up again.
Microblogging has always felt so strange to me, I could never get into it. Why would I want to hear dozens of different short-form opinions from people? Maybe it's the 'tism, but that sounds so anxiety inducing & overwhelming.
When your follower/following count is small and you're getting to know people and build a community of people you otherwise wouldn't meet IRL, it can be a great thing. When you start getting inundated with too much information when you have 10K + followers, it can be overwhelming and you lose the signal within the noise and find that it may start affecting other parts of life. I suppose each person is different, but that burned me out and made me uninterested and I burned it all down. I found I was losing sleep checking my phone and getting unusually addicted to stupid things.
as it turns out short form stream of conscious rambling was sometimes funny sometimes interesting even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice.
but in its current stage and the state of all social media at this point one wonders why anyone pretends twitter is what it was a decade ago. it just isn't, it could also disappear tomorrow and things probably might even get a little better for the world given how much of a vehicle it is to amplify division.
i remember like i dunno 5-6 years ago when the people in my life started to wean themselves off twitter and i smoked a lot of cope to justify why i was still on it. can't even remember when i stopped using it but again... nothing of value was lost. feels like a fever dream i always thought i had to be tuned the hell in theres just no way that's good for anyone's brain.
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell?
- when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Twitter in its design has never been a platform for discussion, but for shouting into the void. And that seems to have empowered people to voice their most awful opinions because they don't see much pushback
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
> even sometimes pivotal as a communications tool in countries experiencing civil unrest / injustice
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
I opened it again after many years and frankly i'm seeing better content than i find on other social media platforms.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
No, there is an amount of legal reality built into it. With copyright and patents, once you obtain the intellectual property, you keep it for the rest of the term no matter what you do. But with trademarks, your actions (or inaction) can cause you to lose the trademark.
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
> Failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation, and might be lost even if the owner is litigious about it. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
Nothing you've written above contradicts my argument. which is that there's no liability attached to a trademark as opposed to what something made to protect the consumer would require.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
Except US trademark law doesn’t work like that and hence the case.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
Is it accurate to describe this as the public domain? I would expect that the bird logo still enjoys copyright protection, independent from its status as a trademark.
The final paragraph says this, among other things:
"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"
Probably not many do remember, but before this logo Twitter had a different bird logo until the company was already quite big.
If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.
Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
> Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
Reminds me of Carolyn Davidson, Nike’s swoosh logo creator, who was paid $185 for the original design but was later given shares in Nike that ended up being worth a bit more. [1]
I remember when people were called racist just for asking more border control. What's the new definition now?
My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.
> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
The new definition of racist border control includes deporting X00,000 brown people, some of whom had lawful status, and having virtually every one of the 10k refugee admissions be white South African.
Actually General Motors still holds the Oldsmobile trademark and renewed it in April of last year. They don't have to sell cars to keep it, as they still sell parts related to the vehicles alongside merchandise that carries the brand's name. You still have to get a license from General Motors to feature the Oldsmobile 442 in your videogame for example.
General Motors LLC ("New GM") still holds five trademarks on OLDSMOBILE, but they're all for merch, not cars. Trademark classes are hub caps, apparel, catalogs, badge holders, and metal banks. The trademark for the automobile class, 74138034, was cancelled in 2016 for failure to file a declaration of use.
I can't figure out if renaming Twitter to X is the stupidest branding decision I've ever encountered or if it's bloody brilliant.
Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
It's stupid. Every normal (ie not terminally online) person I speak to calls it twitter and is confused if I call it X. For some reason most of them think an "x post" is on instagram too. I guess because influencers call crossposting that?
Pretty sure lots of people would read x post as cross post, not just influencers. ‘X’ to stand in for cross is a fairly old convention; I think I’ve seen 19th century examples.
If you do it in person you have to say X with a slight look of disgust in your face, to let them know what you're talking about.
Most people I know only knows about X/Twitter from the news cycle, it's not something they themselves use, it's just the platform used by journalists, politicians and commentators. It's not a place normal people go.
It is easily one of the most stupid and arrogant business decisions in history. The Twitter brand was easily worth billions and changing to X wiped out an estimated $4 billion to $20 billion in brand value overnight.
I can’t speak to the wisdom of it, but it sure reeks of what I would have done, trying to be edgy in the early 2000s. Kinda like the old “cyber”-everything.
> That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mention "X" without having to further specify what you're talking about, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Maybe more to the point, "Twitter" already had that instant association that Musk totally threw away.
But I actually think changing the branding of the platform was far less dumb than the related necessary changing of terminology associated with using the platform. Twitter managed to associate a unique word for posting on their platform, "tweet", that became widely used and an instantly recognizable reference to using their social media platform specifically even if you didn't mention their name. You could "post" any of a dozen places, you could only "tweet" on Twitter. That's the kind of branding that doesn't happen often and a company would kill for, and Musk threw it away in favor of the same "post" terminology that literally every competitor also uses.
It always made more sense to call these tiny texts as "tweets" rather than "toots" (mastodon) or "status update" (generic) so it would be good having the right to use that term as public domain.
Looks like there is now a tweet.new (not the same as twitter.com ) run by Project Bluebird (not the same as Bluesky). Very confusing.
The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.
Surely by literally saying "formerly Twitter", this is an admission of non-use, thus invalidating the trademark on the term as it is not just "not used for anything" but is explicitly being distanced from by X in writing.
Not really. Think of all of the corporate rebrandings of product lines for a future one to re-use that name.
Ex. Google Wallet -> Android Pay -> Google Pay -> Google Wallet [1]
A big difference here is that X has been pretty clear on it has no intent to launch a product called Twitter. I doubt you can find similar statements from Google saying they'd never launch a Google Wallet after the Android Pay rebrand.
Those include the name of the company and actively marketed product. If Google rebranded to Winklemoops, and Android get renamed to Callithing, then the "Google" and "Android" trademarks would eventually expire due to trademarks being contingent on actual use. So yeah, "Google Wallet" and "Android Pay" would eventually become perfectly valid names for someone else to claim.
And Twitter being renamed to X is literally that: the company and product name were changed, and both the company and product no longer uses that original name for anything other than to call out "formerly Twitter". That is not "use" for the purposes of keeping your trademark.
the "new" Twitter basically looks like a cash/name grab, I was disappointed to see that nobody involved in it was affiliated the Twitter, and it's mostly run by non-technical/lawyer types.
99 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 5.4 ms ] threadBoth X Corp. and Bluebird have asked to go to court on Nov 2027.
I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
Some years ago I spent too much time on Reddit. A shockingly large number of subs were like 50% or more just screenshots of tweets. And I’m not even talking about the twitter themed subs.
You could scroll through the front page and a significant number of posts were just twitter reposts (or doctored ones).
It’s like these social media beasts are in an endless loop of eating each others vomit and puking it back up again.
mostly bad, though.
(And I should note I left in 2017 when even the funny people couldn’t get a grip on what was happening online)
This is what short form posting was meant for. Jokes and quips from witty people and announcements for things I care about.
That Twitter became a primary source of news for anyone is a major indicator of the decline of civilization
Also, I don't watch TV and only smoke menthols. I mean vape. Or whatever.
Been waiting ever since to see if it would become worthwile for me, or even stand the test of time.
X marks the spot where it seemed to achieve arrested development, so not holding my breath.
but in its current stage and the state of all social media at this point one wonders why anyone pretends twitter is what it was a decade ago. it just isn't, it could also disappear tomorrow and things probably might even get a little better for the world given how much of a vehicle it is to amplify division.
i remember like i dunno 5-6 years ago when the people in my life started to wean themselves off twitter and i smoked a lot of cope to justify why i was still on it. can't even remember when i stopped using it but again... nothing of value was lost. feels like a fever dream i always thought i had to be tuned the hell in theres just no way that's good for anyone's brain.
instagram/facebook over my 20s left some real mental scars though im still trying to sort what the f those apps did to me and to culture at large. i quit instagram like 3 years ago, the classic millenial exploration of pruning your life of shite things to lower the anxiety. the scars i am still stuck with, and mind you i literally don't have these apps anymore:
- i still feel this soft pressure that anything i do doesn't matter unless there is a witness (a post, a story, etc). that is insane. it's been three years and i can still feel that what the hell? - when you're on the other side it feels like you're just sitting outside of the rest of the worlds culture at this point. it can actually challenge why you left it in the first place and make you consider sacrificing your own well being just to not feel like you're not an outsider from another planet
i never did the tiktok thing so i dunno what that's like. at least leaving twitter felt like shutting a book that kinda sucked and you don't really ever think about it again
Short messages bias toward simple slogans and memes devoid of context or nuance. It leads to “context collapse” in the discourse and the worst kind of echo chamber effects. You can’t ask for a better medium to spread rumor and disinformation.
Then, to supercharge its badness, it sorts by “engagement” which promotes the dumbest or most triggering stuff.
Think of the last point this way: two people walk past you. One says “hi.” The other strips and smears themselves with peanut butter and starts clucking like a chicken and saluting Hitler. Which of these two people maximizes engagement?
The peanut butter smeared clucking Nazi is now President. The opinions that dominate discourse everywhere are now the opinions of those types of people.
Social media is collective brain poison. Bluesky and Mastodon might be slightly less bad on the “maximizing engagement” part but they still cause the context collapse and echo chamber effects. The “microblogging” format is inherently toxic and irredeemable.
I get why you or anyone would say that. But I assure you, it is less accountable and more disinformation than anything remotely positive or helpful. Source? Arab Spring.
Twitter, and other similar designs are parasocial mass media.
For example, instagram is clearly trying to understand what political side i lean on and pushes me that kind of content. I have to be very careful what kind of stuff i like otherwise my feed gets very polluted with political content rather than with interesting tech stuff and cats videos.
On the other hand, X/Twitter is routinely serving me better and more interesting technical content.
That's something we hear often but it's not grounded in an legal reality: trademarks are purely a form of intellectual property that a person (physical or moral) can hold and it doesn't come with any attached liability: you can't hold a company accountable for violating the trust built around its brand name in past year, and the owner is free to sell the brand name to another company or change their products in a way that mislead the consumer about its quality.
In fact, should a trademark come with a promise about the quality of the product, Twitter would have lost it's trademark as soon as Elon transformed it into a disinformation machine (by breaking how the blue tick works and boosting paying account's content).
The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.
Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.
But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.
It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).
You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.
> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.
The legal purpose of the trademark is to protect identifying marks for the purposes of conducting business (trade)--literally its name. The subsidiary public interest of attaching trust to that mark isn't directly protected, but failing to police the use of trademark is sufficient grounds to lose the trademark, which is why companies tend to be overly aggressive in suing people for violating the trademark.
Not quite. There is no litigation requirement to renew a trademark registration. Trademarks are in fact the only type of intellectual property that can be preserved in perpetuity.
Litigation is an attempt to prevent genericide, and might fail at that.
Trademarks can be preserved even in the absence of litigation, and might be lost even if the owner is litigious about it. Cancellation cases in US law typically require evidence of abandonment and lack of evidence for intended re-uptake. Litigation is not necessary to refute abandonment.
Nonsense. The core reason to enforce trademarks is to prove that you have it.
The yo-yo used to be a trademark too, but the problem was what else do you call it? If the "owner" of a trademark cannot defend it, they don't have it. That's how trademark law is very different than copyright (which is implicit and automatic): You can lose a trademark even if you register it and popularise it, if you can't prove that the trademark represents your actual trade.
> [I think] the trademark should hold for as long as a reasonable person can be confused by the new Twitter regardless of people's dislike towards Elon.
That's your opinion man. Thankfully the law doesn't work that way.
I don't even know whether you mean X (the new thing that was once twitter) or tweet (the new thing that claims to will-be what twitter once was)
> I may be biased because I still go to Twitter via twitter.com.
and that didn't help in the slightest, but domain squatting is very common on the Internet.
One of the core things a company needs to do to demonstrate it needs a trademark protected is that it’s actively using said trademark. If X has effectively abandoned Twitter, then it can’t really claim it still needs to protect the name.
What you’re describing is more the “Kleenex” effect where words become commonplace. In this case another company builds a platform that has “tweets.” There it’s even more important that the company with the trademark shows that they use the trademark. Here the owner has basically scrubbed the trademark from their existence hence why folks are making these claims.
"The court ruled on a preliminary injunction request, so it’s not the final word on the merits. Still, it seems highly likely that the TWEET term and the bird logo have been freed from X’s trademark clutches. If so, it’s nice to get some cultural assets back into the public domain"
Seems kind of dubious to say the least.
If I remember correctly this logo was allegedly bought from a royalty free image platform and Twitter had no exclusive rights to it. Also there was a little outcry that the original artist just received the royalty free platform usual ridiculously small one time payment.
EDIT: The one I remember is the second one in the timeline image from the following (unfortunately ad infested) article, so apparently it was not the first one they had.
https://www.afaqs.com/news/digital/has-musk-gone-too-far-wit...
https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/afaqs/me...
The original logos weren't great but they were more charming than X
https://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9D%95%8F
Reminds me of Carolyn Davidson, Nike’s swoosh logo creator, who was paid $185 for the original design but was later given shares in Nike that ended up being worth a bit more. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Davidson_(graphic_desi...
My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning. Racist used to be someone who really despised black/brown people. Now every Trump voter is apparently a racist.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
Every time Danish media talks about X, they say "The social media X". So X in itself is completely unrecognizable, you actively have to mention that you're talking about the social media platform. That's is however also rather genius, because now the connection between X and "social media" is strengthened every time it's mentioned.
Most people I know only knows about X/Twitter from the news cycle, it's not something they themselves use, it's just the platform used by journalists, politicians and commentators. It's not a place normal people go.
It's a patently boneheaded branding decision, there's no way to spin it as even potentially smart.
If that was true we'd be getting closer to a point where you could mention "X" without having to further specify what you're talking about, which doesn't seem to be happening any time soon. Maybe more to the point, "Twitter" already had that instant association that Musk totally threw away.
But I actually think changing the branding of the platform was far less dumb than the related necessary changing of terminology associated with using the platform. Twitter managed to associate a unique word for posting on their platform, "tweet", that became widely used and an instantly recognizable reference to using their social media platform specifically even if you didn't mention their name. You could "post" any of a dozen places, you could only "tweet" on Twitter. That's the kind of branding that doesn't happen often and a company would kill for, and Musk threw it away in favor of the same "post" terminology that literally every competitor also uses.
"Twitter Is Back at Twitter.now" 26.aug.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455791 19 comments
"New Twitter rebrands to Tweet.app after court's double-edged ruling" 06.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581979
"Twitter" 10.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223543 11 comments
"Former Twitter Attorney Files for 'Twitter' Trademark" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208672 13 comments
"US startup seeks to reclaim Twitter trademarks 'abandoned' by Musk's X" 09.dec.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203468
There have been worse names for this kind of updates in the past. At some point in time was common to "finger" someone online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
<smoking emoji>
https://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/
The "Trust Dial" seems a new concept to be fair. Then again, it's just a concept and possibly AI generated like the rest of the page. I wonder what trust score would the website assign to itself at that point.
What did they do before it?
Ex. Google Wallet -> Android Pay -> Google Pay -> Google Wallet [1]
A big difference here is that X has been pretty clear on it has no intent to launch a product called Twitter. I doubt you can find similar statements from Google saying they'd never launch a Google Wallet after the Android Pay rebrand.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wallet
And Twitter being renamed to X is literally that: the company and product name were changed, and both the company and product no longer uses that original name for anything other than to call out "formerly Twitter". That is not "use" for the purposes of keeping your trademark.