Twitter shares flew higher Thursday after reporting a record quarterly profit that helped investors look past a drop in the number of users due to the weeding out of fake and abusive accounts. The San Francisco group delivered a $789 million profit, including one-time gains, compared to a net loss of $21 million in the previous year, as revenues grew 29 percent to $758 million.
Shares soared 17 percent to 32.24 in morning trade following the better-than-expected results, which helped investors overlook a drop in Twitter's user base. Average monthly active users totaled 326 million, down from 335 million in the previous quarter. The company said the drop came from efforts to weed out fake and inauthentic accounts. The recently enacted privacy rules in the European Union also had an effect.
The record profit represented a fourth consecutive positive quarter for Twitter after years of losses, and included one-time gains from tax adjustments. Excluding those items, profits amounted to $163 million. Twitter said the drop in its user count was a direct result of efforts to improve the "health" of its platform by removing fake and abusive accounts. "We're achieving meaningful progress in our efforts to make Twitter a healthier and valuable everyday service," said chief executive Jack Dorsey in a statement.
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