X head of product Nikita Bier announced that the app is getting a new video editor and recorder. It is not another toy for cutting clips. Bier wants creators on X to film their own material and stop recycling other people's. According to him, many posts from the most-followed accounts contain stolen footage, sometimes five years after it first spread.
A platform that wants to grow needs an offer of original content, and that is being drained away by competitors with better payouts. X is therefore trying to lower the barrier to entry for creators directly inside the app. The missing piece, however, was never the tools.
What the new editor can do
The editor adds captions in several languages, with the option to adjust their look, and a green screen tool that uses photos from the phone or other posts on X as the background. “One of our biggest priorities is to give creators the tools to create original content [and] reward those creators,” Bier wrote, adding that further updates will come in the following weeks. For now it is iOS only, as the Android app is being rewritten.
Bier himself frames the editor as a “functional” tool that lets videos on X “finally be original content that doesn't exist on other platforms”. Multilingual captions are a specific matter for European creators, however. A video that adds its own English caption gets past one of the main obstacles to reach beyond its home market.
Tools are not what is missing, though
Recycled content is a proven shortcut to reach, because it means real money. X shares revenue with creators, so copying other people's videos pays. The editor alone does not change that equation.
The choice of where a creator puts their work depends on the audience of real people and the reliability of payouts. Competitors have both in place. TikTok, Meta and YouTube offer established ecosystems with regular and reliable payments. The European creator is already spread across them, and X wants them to publish mainly with it. So far it offers the weaker half of that exchange.
Bier himself complicates the platform's relationship with its creators. A few days before the editor launched, he publicly criticised one of YouTube's biggest creators, MrBeast, over the nature of his videos. “For the love of God, make a single piece of content without financial bait,” he wrote. A company that wants to attract professionals is also telling them how to create.
Bots and stolen content
X does not yet have built-in tools that let a creator report stolen work and defend themselves. Meta lets the original author either block the visibility of stolen content or add an attribution link to it and monetise it. YouTube has long offered tools for finding and removing unauthorised re-uploads.
Bots hang over all of this too. They can inflate view counts while also scraping and stealing content. In April, Bier said that X identifies and removes “208 bots per minute and growing”. Earlier he said that half of the product team had been working on anti-spam features.
The editor therefore targets the supply side. It does not touch the economics of payouts or the cleaning of the network. Bier did offer another reason, though. According to him, posts with video make up almost half of the views on X, so this is not just an attempt to copy TikTok. When video drives most of the attention, its quality becomes a business problem. He made that case himself.
The same pressure is felt across the industry
AI-era spam is pressing on everyone. Reddit has just announced that it is deploying AI tools against the growing volume of spam and bot content that large language models have made possible. Digg, a Reddit rival that never really took off, shut down its app this year, saying that as a new startup it had no way of handling surges of spam.
For a brand considering video on X, one piece of the puzzle has shifted. Tools for original content are now there. The audience, payouts and a clean feed, which decide whether creating pays off, remain open.
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