X says top accounts steal videos from other users as it announces new video tools

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, said in a post on Monday that “[m]any videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes 5 years after they originally went viral,” while noting that videos on the platform “make up close to half the impressions on X.” According to Bier, X is launching a new in-app video editor and recorder to address this “recycled content,” so that “some videos on X can finally be original content that doesn’t exist on other platforms.”

As previously reported by TechCrunch, the new video tools are available now on X’s iOS app, and include an option for overlaying captions in multiple languages and a “green screen” feature for adding custom backgrounds “using posts or photos from your camera roll.” A video in Bier’s announcement post also shows a tool for trimming videos and an option for automatically generating captions. The green screen videos look a lot like what you’ll already see on Instagram and TikTok.

The new video tools are X’s latest push to encourage more users to post original content. In May, Bier also said his team had identified “a number of large accounts” that were “programmatically reuploading content” from other users in an effort to game X’s revenue share program, adding that X would be allocating the impressions from those posts to the original creator. Bier similarly announced in April that X was cutting back on payouts to “aggregators” sharing “stolen reposts and clickbait.” Now, alongside announcing the new video tools, Bier says creators who don’t post recycled content “will climb faster than other account[s].”