Greetings X, Disclose.tv would like to address the false claim that we "cropped out attribution" from a Spaceflight Now video by removing their logo, replacing it with our own, and reuploading it to X. We did not. We have since contacted the original clip's owner and submitted a formal appeal to X. We have taken some time to think about our response to this incident and or misunderstanding, which has led to our removal from X's Creator Program. After almost 18 years on the platform, the purpose of Disclose.tv's content, and that of many fellow X news aggregators, is to spend our time curating and summarizing current news events so that you, our followers, don't have to. Our goal is to help people quickly stay informed without having to spend the over 12 hours per day 7 days a week that we do to stay updated on news events. Our work is a continuous curation process across long news cycles, involves extended monitoring of live events, broadcasts, reviewing numerous sources and publishers to extract and verify the most relevant information for our followers. Our work also extends beyond X, it is multi-platform, including YouTube and TikTok, where we've produced short documentaries and short-form content, as well as a dedicated news website where we host additional summarized news content in article form. For this specific incident, we did not crop or remove anything. Most importantly, our team member obtained the footage off-platform, from what they believed to be a public broadcast YouTube livestream that contained no watermarking, graphics, or logos. Had the livestream contained watermarking, graphics or logos of any nature, we would’ve included these as our track record illustrates. Additionally, if we had seen the original creator’s post on X we would’ve used the true creator’s video rather than clipping and posting ourselves. We would like to note here that the Disclose.tv logomark on video clips is used only for internal tracking across distribution channels. It is applied in OBS capture at low opacity (about 7%) and is deliberately unobtrusive, hence its small size of just 65 pixels. In darker footage, it may appear more visible simply due to contrast with the background. It does not include an @ handle, promotional messaging, or any other elements one would expect if the intent were advertising, follower acquisition, or claiming ownership of the content. There is no historical precedent of Disclose.tv intentionally removing watermarks and reuploading content. In fact, we routinely preserve third party logos, watermarks, and attribution when they are present in source material as a matter of policy; explicitly providing clear sourcing. The same applies to text-based reporting with headlines and excerpts from current events generally attributed explicitly to the original source. We note here that many X users have downloaded and reused our content in their own posts, which has never been an issue for us. Keeping people informed about world events has always taken priority. We believe the Creator Program has been a positive development for X. It enabled us to provide members of our team with better hardware and software, inspiring us to reconsider relaunching and developing new, more original forms of content for the platform behind the scenes. But, we also note that for more than 15 of the 18 years we have spent on this platform, we were not monetized, nor did we ever take any sponsorship, enabling editorial freedom. That being said, one person being able to demonetize accounts arbitrarily, without warning or due process and under an immediate presumption of guilt, reminds one of the old Twitter days, when lunatics reigned over the platform enforcing rules that nobody asked for, where non-compliance led to account deletion at any time, with no clear path to appeal. Our small team was disappointed as we really thought that X had grown up and become a more professional platform. Human aggregators, especially human news aggregators, were always and are part of X's core, just as human creators and human consumers are. They provide valuable signal amid all the noise. — Disclose.tv