X Admits Its Biggest Video Accounts Are Built on Stolen Content

X has a content theft problem, and the company's head of product just said so in plain terms. In a post on Monday, Nikita Bier wrote that "many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes 5 years after they originally went viral." He noted that video already accounts for close to half of all impressions on the platform, meaning a huge chunk of what people scroll past every day may not have originated where they saw it.

Bier's answer is a new set of video creation tools, rolled out now in X's iOS app, meant to make it easier for people to shoot and edit original video without leaving the app at all. As Bier put it, the goal is for X posts to "finally be original content that doesn't exist on other platforms."

What's actually new

The toolkit includes a built-in editor and recorder, along with a trimming function, automatic caption generation, and support for overlaying captions in multiple languages. There's also a green screen feature that lets users swap in custom backgrounds pulled from posts, photos, or their own camera roll. As TechCrunch first reported, all of this is live now for iOS users. Anyone who has spent time on Instagram or TikTok will recognize the format immediately. Green screen effects and in-app caption overlays have been standard features on both apps for years, and X is essentially catching up rather than inventing something new.

The more interesting part isn't the toolset. It's the admission behind it.

A pattern of call-outs

This isn't the first time Bier has publicly flagged bad actors gaming X's system. Back in May, he said his team had found large accounts "programmatically reuploading content" from other creators specifically to exploit X's revenue share program, which pays creators based on engagement. His response then was to redirect the impressions from those reposts back to whoever originally posted the content. In April, he went further, announcing that X would cut payouts to what he called "aggregators" — accounts built around "stolen reposts and clickbait."

Taken together, these moves paint a picture of a platform that has, for a while now, had an incentive structure that rewarded repackaging other people's work over making anything new. Monday's announcement is the latest attempt to correct for that, and Bier is framing the new editing tools as part of the fix: accounts that stick to original posts, he said, "will climb faster than other account[s]" going forward.

Why this matters

X's revenue share program ties real money to engagement, which means stolen content wasn't just an annoyance for the original creators, it was actively siphoning payouts away from them and toward accounts doing nothing but repackaging viral clips. A five-year-old video resurfacing under a different account's name, racking up fresh engagement and fresh ad revenue, is a fairly stark example of how broken that incentive loop had become.

Giving creators an easier path to shoot original video, complete with editing and captioning built right into the app, is a reasonable countermeasure. It lowers the friction for making something new, which is presumably the point. Whether it's enough to outweigh the incentive to just repost someone else's viral hit is a separate question. X has already shown it's willing to adjust the underlying reward system directly, by reallocating impressions and throttling payouts to repeat offenders, rather than relying purely on better tools to nudge behavior.

What's notable here is the candor. Companies don't usually put a number on how much of their platform's most-viewed content is essentially theft. Bier did, and tied it to a concrete product response rather than leaving it as a vague acknowledgment. Whether the new editor meaningfully shifts the balance toward original posts, or just gives X another data point to point to next time this comes up, is something worth watching as the tools roll out more broadly.