X Launches a Video Editor for iOS With Multilingual Captions and Green Screen
Head of product Nikita Bier named the problem directly - top accounts regularly repost stolen video - and shipped the first native editing tools to push back
X launched a Video Editor and Recorder for iOS today. Nikita Bier, X's head of product, described the X video editor as a direct response to stolen content: many posts from top accounts on the platform contain video that others originally made, sometimes circulating years after it first went viral, and X had no native tools to give creators a reason to make something original instead.
Two features headline the release. Creators can overlay captions in multiple languages and customize their appearance - color, font, and positioning. Green Screen lets them swap in a background using any photo from their camera roll or any post already on X as a backdrop for new video. Bier said more updates arrive in the coming weeks, without naming them.
Android users get nothing from today's launch. X is still rebuilding that app, so the editor runs on iOS only for now. Videos already make up close to half of all impressions on X, which frames this as a strategic push rather than a feature checkbox.
Bier's stated goal is to enable content that, in his words, "doesn't exist on other platforms." Captions and green screen cover the creation side. Protection is a different problem. Meta lets Reels creators block stolen videos or redirect their monetization to the original account; YouTube has offered unauthorized-reupload detection since 2018. X has neither, leaving any creator whose video gets reposted today with no automated tool to flag it or claim revenue from it.
Bier also publicly criticized MrBeast, one of YouTube's largest creators, this weekend for producing content built around "financial bait." Attracting creators to X while its head of product calls out the format that built YouTube's creator economy is an unusual recruitment pitch. Bots compound the problem further. In April, Bier said X was identifying and suspending 208 bots per minute - accounts that inflate view counts and scrape content to repost at scale - and noted that half his product team was focused on spam reduction.
More updates to the X video editor are coming in the weeks ahead. Whether creators choose to build an audience on X rather than post the same video everywhere depends on more than what the editor can do.
