X Launches Built-In Video Editor to Promote Original Creator Content Over Reposted Videos

X is introducing a new suite of video recording and editing tools to encourage creators to upload original videos rather than repost content from other platforms. The move comes as the social network continues battling spam accounts and content theft across its service.

The update introduces several new editing capabilities, including multilingual video captions with customizable styles and green-screen features that allow creators to place themselves in front of images stored on their phones or even posts already shared on X.

According to X’s Head of Product, Nikita Bier, giving creators better production tools has become one of the platform’s highest priorities.

“One of our biggest priorities is to give creators the tools to create original content [and] reward those creators,” Bier wrote in a post announcing the update. He added that additional improvements to the video editor are expected in the coming weeks.

Bier said the goal is to offer creators a fully functional editing experience so that videos published on X can increasingly become unique, platform-native content instead of recycled clips that first appeared elsewhere.

He also acknowledged that many of the platform’s highest-performing accounts regularly repost material created by others, sometimes resurfacing videos that first went viral several years ago.

Reposting existing content has long been an easy way to attract large audiences across social media platforms, particularly when creators can earn money from high engagement. However, simply introducing better editing tools is unlikely to eliminate that behaviour on its own.

For X to build a healthy creator economy, it must also ensure creators can consistently reach large audiences of genuine users and reliably earn income from their original work. Exclusive publishing on X remains a difficult proposition while competing platforms such as TikTok, Meta, and YouTube continue to offer mature creator ecosystems with established monetization programs and dependable payouts.

The platform may also need to strengthen its relationships with creators. Recently, Bier publicly criticized one of YouTube’s biggest content creators over the style of his videos, highlighting ongoing conversations about the type of content X wants to encourage.

In addition, X currently lacks several creator protection tools that have become common on competing platforms.

For example, Meta provides Reels creators with mechanisms to report stolen videos, either reducing the visibility of unauthorized videos or attaching attribution links that allow the original creator to benefit from the content. Likewise, YouTube has long offered systems that help creators detect and request the removal of unauthorized uploads.

Another major challenge remains the platform’s large bot population.

Automated accounts not only inflate engagement metrics such as video views but also scrape, duplicate, and redistribute original content. Earlier this year, Bier disclosed that X was identifying and suspending approximately 208 bots every minute, illustrating the scale of the issue. Before that, he revealed that roughly half of the company’s product team had been focused on developing features to reduce spam and automated abuse.

Beyond reducing recycled content—which Bier described as hurting both the user experience and the business—he pointed to video’s growing importance across the platform.

According to Bier, posts containing videos now account for nearly half of all impressions generated on X, making investing in video tools a strategic priority rather than simply an attempt to compete with TikTok.

X is hardly alone in facing rising levels of AI-driven spam.

Reddit recently announced that it is deploying artificial intelligence tools to combat the increasing volume of spam and bot-generated content enabled by large language models. Earlier this year, social news platform Digg also shut down its app, saying that, as a startup, it lacked the resources needed to fight the overwhelming amount of automated spam appearing online effectively.

For now, X’s new video editor and recording features are available first through the platform’s iOS application. At the same time, Bier said the Android version is still undergoing a major rebuild before receiving the same capabilities.