Twitter said its commitment to delivering people more relevant content, reducing spam and stopping abusive behavior before it happens helped boost sales and engagement on its social media platform over the past three months.
The company has struggled, as most social media companies have, with disinformation campaigns, malicious behavior and spam. Social media companies have said the problems they face are beyond the ability of human moderators to control. Twitter, Facebook and others have turned to artificial intelligence to weed out the most offensive content, and humans make judgment calls about the borderline ones.
Twitter says its plan is working. It reported Friday that spammy and suspicious behavior on Twitter fell 18% across tweet detail pages which show tweet replies.
“Health remains our top priority and we are proud of the work we did in Q2,” said CEO Jack Dorsey in a statement. “Our focus was on ensuring that our rules, and how we enforce them, are easy to understand.”
Twitter said it continues to devote the bulk of its resources to its spam and malicious behavior problem, as it continues to help people feel safe and confident that the information they read on Twitter is credible.
Among the new initiatives last quarter, Twitter announced in June it would place a disclaimer on tweets from world leaders that break its rules but that Twitter decides are in the “public interest.”
The company is winning people over — 139 million of them used Twitter every day last quarter, up from 134 million in the previous quarter.
That helped Twitter grow its sales by 18% to $841 million between April and June.
Twitter scored a massive $1.1 billion profit last quarter, but virtually of that was because of a significant one-time tax benefit from some international deferrals. Without the benefit, Twitter said it earned just $37 million last quarter.
The company said it expects sales to grow about 11% next quarter, and it will increase spending 20% this year to about $575 million.
Twitter’s stock rose 3% in premarket trading.
