X has launched a new tool on iOS that lets people edit and record videos directly in the app. The company says it's responding to a real problem: a lot of the videos that get popular on X aren't new. Some are copies of videos that went viral years earlier, reposted by accounts trying to build an audience without doing any original work.

In July 2026, Nikita Bier, who leads product at X, publicly said that many of the platform's biggest accounts are reposting videos from other users — sometimes five years after the original. Videos now make up almost half of everything people see on X The Verge.

The new editing tool includes basic features: you can trim videos, automatically add captions in different languages, and use a green-screen effect to put yourself in front of a custom background The Verge. The idea is simple — make it easier for creators to shoot and edit original video without leaving the app, so they have less reason to just grab someone else's clip.

X is treating this as a serious business problem. Since video drives roughly half of what people see, the quality of that content pool matters for how much money the platform can make from ads and how much it can pay creators. If the feed fills with stolen clips, that system breaks down. Bier's comments suggest X sees this not just as a cleanup task but as a threat to how the platform actually makes money and attracts creators who might otherwise go to YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or Instagram Reels.

This isn't X's first move against recycled content this year. In May 2026, Bier announced that X had found large accounts systematically reposting videos specifically to claim money through X's creator payment system. X said it would start giving those views and that money back to whoever posted the original video The Verge. A month before, in April, X cut payments to accounts that made money by stealing other people's posts and slapping misleading headlines on them The Verge. Bier also said X was hiring engineers to build systems that can detect when a video is a copy of something posted earlier Nikita Bier.

Put together, these moves form a three-step plan: stop paying people who repost, use detection systems to credit and reward the original creator, and make it so easy to create original video that there's no point in reposting. Bier has said plainly that creators who post original content will grow faster on X than those who recycle other people's videos The Verge, which tells creators where the platform's algorithms are heading.

The math behind reposting is familiar. Some accounts find trending videos, strip out identifying information, repost them with a small change, and repeat across hundreds or thousands of posts. If just a few get views, the volume pays off. What Bier described — videos surfacing five years after they first went viral — points to a bigger detection challenge. Videos get re-encoded, cropped, and watermarks get removed. Simple pattern-matching can't catch all of that.

There are limits to what the new editing tool alone can accomplish. It makes creating new videos easier, but it doesn't identify videos that were already stolen by accounts that will never use these tools in the first place. The real test is whether X's detection systems actually work. That's harder to measure from the outside without the company publishing how often they catch real copies versus falsely flag legitimate videos.

The larger picture is that X is trying to compete with platforms that have spent years perfecting tools for making short videos, while also fixing a broken incentive system that made reposting profitable. Those goals can work against each other. Better editing tools mean more videos uploaded to X, which gives detection systems more work to do. Whether X can stay ahead of smarter reposters, or whether the new payment rules just push them to hide their copies better, is what matters over the next several months.