San Francisco (AFP)

Twitter's efforts to reconcile the clean-up of its platform and the loyalty of its audiences seem to have paid in the second quarter of 2019, and are welcomed by investors.

The social network, which had to remove many false accounts to fight against inappropriate content and misinformation, is closely monitored on the growth of its number of users, essential for its customers, advertisers.

With $ 841 million in sales, up 18% year on year, and 139 million daily users monetizable, Twitter pleasantly surprised analysts, who did not expect so much.

Its stock took 10% at 17:30 GMT on the New York Stock Exchange.

"We know who we are now - we know what sets us apart from our competitors and why people use this service," said Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of the group, at a conference for analysts.

It attributes the growth in the number of daily users monetizable (+ 14% in one year) at the same time to the great cleaning and the technological improvements so that the service is more practical and pleasant to use.

"We have made a lot of progress on identifying and eradicating malicious behavior, and the responsibility for reporting tweets should no longer be on the victims," ​​said Dorsey, pointing to a drop of 18 percent in suspicious behavior.

Twitter is using more and more artificial intelligence tools, such as automated learning ("machine learning"), both to remove false accounts and to enhance the enhancement and prioritization of content.

This makes it easier for users to find what's interesting to them in the hundreds of millions of tweets, images, and videos they send to the network every day.

- "Pleasing Advertisers" -

"The value of Twitter for the advertising industry is not the size of its audience, but the involvement of its users," said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at eMarketer. "This strong growth in daily monetizable users shows that Twitter users are joining the platform, which should appeal to advertisers."

Most of the network's revenues come from advertising revenues, notably in the United States, which represent $ 455 million in revenue, up 24% year-on-year.

To support its growth in the short and medium term, Twitter relies on tools that facilitate user-to-user exchanges and emphasize video.

For the third quarter, the bluebird company forecasts a turnover of between 815 and 875 million dollars.

But Twitter already has eyes turned towards 2020, rich in events highly "tweetable", like the American elections or the Olympics in Tokyo.

"For events like the Olympics, we think video is a great way to enrich conversations, we want to make more people participate, to react live, to witness the rush of the crowd, but also find a recap of what they missed, "detailed Jack Dorsey.

© 2019 AFP