X’s own head of product said it plainly: many of the platform’s biggest accounts are just reposting other people’s videos, sometimes years after they originally went viral.
Nikita Bier posted that videos make up close to half of all impressions on X. But a lot of that video content is stolen. Recycled. Reposted from other platforms without credit.
X’s answer is a new in-app video editor and recorder. It’s live now on iOS. The editor includes multi-language caption overlays, a green screen feature for custom backgrounds, video trimming, and auto-generated captions. Bier says creators who don’t post recycled content will climb faster in the algorithm.
This isn’t X’s first crack at the problem. In May, Bier said the team identified large accounts programmatically reuploading content to game the revenue share program. X started allocating impressions from those reposts to the original creators. In April, X cut payouts to what Bier called aggregators sharing stolen reposts and clickbait.
The green screen feature looks a lot like what Instagram and TikTok already have. But at least X is trying to make it easier to create something original instead of just scraping YouTube.
