WASHINGTON: Twitter shares flew higher Tuesday after a surprisingly robust quarterly report, which sparked a fresh tirade from President Donald Trump over his claims of unfair treatment by social media.

The first-quarter report showed a profit of $191 million, compared with $61 million a year earlier, while revenues increased 18 percent to $787 million for the short messaging platform.

Twitter shares soared 15.6 percent to close at a nine-month high of $39.76 after the update from the short messaging platform, showing gains in advertising revenue and some signs that its user base is growing.

Trump, arguably the platform’s most prominent user, sought to claim credit for the strong Twitter results while renewing his allegations of bias.

On his Twitter feed, Trump said the results were good but could be better “if Twitter wasn’t playing their political games” and argued for “more, and fairer, companies.”

Twitter’s global user base appeared to show modest growth even as the company transitions to a different way of measuring it.

The longstanding metric of monthly active users was 330 million in the January-March period, an increase of nine million from the past quarter but down slightly from a year ago.

But Twitter no longer will use that measure, switching instead to “monetizable” daily active users — 134 million in the past quarter, up from 120 million last year.

Chief executive Jack Dorsey said Twitter is benefiting from its moves to root out abusive and inauthentic content that had hurt Twitter’s reputation.

“We are taking a more proactive approach to reducing abuse and its effects on Twitter,” said Dorsey.

“We are reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported.”

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