X announced updates that will help to expand accessibility and provide more controls over who can engage with posts. The company also posted a much-anticipated update to the app’s image editing.
First, X announced that it's rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered auto-translate option to all users worldwide, which will enable more users to read posts from other regions.
X began integrating its updated AI translation approach in June last year, phasing out Google Translate as its primary provider, and making its own AI system its top translation source for posts.
As explained by Nikita Bier, X’s head of product: “The translations are powered by Grok and have improved substantially over the last couple months. If you prefer to read in the original language, you can always turn off auto-translate by tapping the gear icon.”
X has made regional engagement a bigger focus of late, as it looks to combat foreign interference, by removing the incentives for users to post about politics in other markets.
Last month, Bier announced a change to X’s creator revenue share program. That shift was made in order to give more weight to impressions from a user’s home region, Bier said, and was designed “to encourage content that resonates with people in your country, in neighboring countries and people who speak your language.”
Part of the motivation for that change was that users from various regions were posting about U.S. politics, because discussion of U.S. political topics generated more engagement, and drove more potential revenue opportunities for X creators.
Bier said this change would reduce the incentive for creators to spread divisive content and political misinformation, but after reading criticism of the update from many top accounts, X owner Elon Musk canceled the change before it went into effect.
Even so, X is keen to promote a wider scope of regional discussion. Universal access to translation tools could help by making it easier for users to engage with top posts outside their home regions while also broadening access to posts in nations where multiple languages are spoken.
On another front, X launched a new reply setting on posts, which will let paying X users give second-degree connections of their audience the ability to comment on their posts.
X said this will allow a wider audience to participate, while keeping the discussion confined, and afford creators more control while expanding their audience.
X launched an initial test of the new reply option last month, and it’s now available to all Premium users.
Finally, X also rolled out a new photo editor within the post composer, which includes new drawing and text overlay functionalities and the capacity to use Grok’s image editing features.
This last update has been much-requested, and gives X users more capacity to create and customize their visuals before posting. The tools will also let users blur in order to redact parts of a photo in-stream.
That could lead to a resurgence in image posting in the app, or a change in native visual behaviors within X posts.
The new photo editor is available in the latest version of X on iOS. X said it’s coming to Android soon.
