Twitter is getting whacked after posting its 2nd-ever quarterly profit (TWTR)

The company said it earned an adjusted $0.16 per share where Wall Street had expected $0.12.
Shares rose in early trading before falling deeply into the red, down more than 7% mid-morning.

Shares of Twitter are getting whacked, down more than 7% in early trading Wednesday, after the social network posted its second profitable quarter in a row by GAAP standards. The stock initially popped as high as 4% before sinking into the red as the company's conference call began.

For the first quarter of 2018, Twitter said it earned an adjusted $0.16 per, topping the $0.12 gain that analysts surveyed by Bloomberg were expecting. Revenue came in at $664.87 million, beating the $605.93 million that was anticipated.

"We made meaningful progress in our ongoing safety and information quality work in Q1, and we are continuing to invest in improving the quality of content and the overall health of the conversation on Twitter," the company said in a letter to shareholders.

Monthly active users, a closely watched metric for social media companies, grew by 6 million to 336 million, slightly more than analysts had expected. The company does not disclosed daily active users.

Twitter also raised its guidance for the second quarter, saying it expects EBITDA of between $245 million and $265 million. Analysts polled by Bloomberg previously expected $218 million for the three-months ending June 31.

Twitter is widely seen as being at risk from any new data privacy regulations in the wake of Facebook's scandal with the firm Cambridge Analytica, which exposed 87 million users private data. It has been harshly criticized for its response to Russian bots flooding its platform during the 2016 US presidential election.

"There’s just been a continued global interest in news and information that’s a good tailwind for Twitter, especially as their products improve," Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, told Bloomberg News. "They’re iterating the product more in the last two years than they have in the past seven."

Twitter is up 28% so far in 2018.