X, the social network that can’t seem to win its years-long battle with bots, is introducing new video editing and recording features in hopes of encouraging creators to post original content on its platform instead of recycling other people’s material.
The update will bring new features, including the ability to overlay video captions in multiple languages and customize their appearance, as well as green screen tools that work with photos from your phone camera or other X posts.
“One of our biggest priorities is to give creators the tools to create original content [and] reward those creators,” X chief product officer Nikita Bier said. he wrote in a post. “We have many more updates to the video editor in the coming weeks.”
The idea, Bier says, is to provide a “functional” video editor so that 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 first 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 this.
To foster 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 publish exclusively on X, creators would need more incentive, given that its competitors such as TikTok, Meta and YouTube have built complete ecosystems with stable, reliable payments.
X may also need to renew its creator relationships: 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 example, allows the original creator owner to either block the visibility of stolen content or add attribution links for monetization. YouTube has also long offered tools to find and remove unauthorized re-uploads.
Most importantly, X has to deal with its overwhelming bot populations, as they can inflate views in addition to scraping and stealing content. In April, Bier said that X detected and suspended “208 bots per minute and counting,” to give a sense of the scale of the problem. Before that, he said that half of the product team focused on developing features to mitigate spam.
Hearse is offered other reasons for the upgrade, beyond the fact that recycled content has a “negative impact on user experience and business.” He said posts on X that contain videos already make up nearly half of 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 increasing amounts of spam in the age of artificial intelligence. Reddit, for example, just said it is implementing artificial intelligence tools to deal with the growing volume of spam and bot content made possible by the rise of large language models (LLM).
Digg, a would-be competitor to Reddit, shut down its app earlier this year, saying it didn’t have the means to combat the overwhelming amount of spam as a new startup.
Bier said the video editor and recorder are initially available on the iOS app, as the Android app is still being rebuilt.
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