X Introduces New Video Tools to Combat Recycled Content

X, the social network that can’t seem to win its perennial battle with bots, is introducing new video editing and recording features in hopes of encouraging creators to publish original content on its platform instead of recycling others’ material.

The update will bring new features, including the ability to overlay video captions in multiple languages and customize their look, as well as green-screen tools that work with photos from your phone’s camera roll or other X posts.

“One of our biggest priorities is to give creators the tools to create original content [and] reward those creators,” X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, wrote in a post. “We have plenty more updates coming to the video editor in the coming weeks.”

The idea, Bier says, is to provide a “functional” video editor so some videos on X can “finally be original content that doesn’t exist on other platforms.” He noted that many posts from top accounts on X contain stolen material, sometimes five years after the content originally went viral.

Recycled content has always been a popular shortcut to virality on social platforms, especially because real money is involved. A video editor alone won’t solve that.

To encourage a thriving creator ecosystem, X must ensure that creators can reach a broad and scalable audience of real people to effectively monetize their work. To post exclusively on X, creators would need more incentives, given that its competitors like TikTok, Meta, and YouTube have established fleshed-out ecosystems with consistent, reliable payouts.

X may need to revamp its creator relations, too: Bier recently criticized one of YouTube’s biggest creators, MrBeast, for the nature of his video content.

X also lacks built-in tools that creators can use to report their work if it’s stolen and take action, similar to the protections Meta offers Reels creators. Meta, for instance, allows the original creator owner to either block their stolen content’s visibility or to add attribution links to monetize it. YouTube has also long offered tools for finding and removing unauthorized re-uploads.

Most importantly, X must deal with its overwhelming populations of bots, as they can inflate views in addition to scraping and stealing content. In April, Bier said that X was identifying and suspending “208 bots per minute and growing,” to give a sense of the problem’s scale. Before that, he said that half the product team was focused on developing features to mitigate spam.

Bier offered other reasons for the upgrade, beyond the fact that recycled content has a “negative impact on the user experience and the business.” He said posts on X that contain videos already make up close to half of the impressions on the social network, so this is more than just a case of X trying to be TikTok.

To be fair, X is far from the only social network plagued by growing amounts of spam in the AI era. Reddit, for instance, just said it is implementing AI tools to address the increasing amount of spam and bot content made possible by the rise of large language models (LLMs).

Digg, a would-be Reddit competitor, shut down its app earlier this year, saying it didn’t have the means to fight the overwhelming amount of spam as a new startup.

Bier said its video editor and recorder are initially available in its iOS app, as the Android app is still being rebuilt.