Facebook said Thursday that it has deleted a record of more than 3 billion fake accounts in the six months spanning last October to March this year.

In its latest community standards enforcement report, Facebook said it has witnessed "a steep increase in the creation of abusive, fake accounts" on its platform in the past half a year, but most of the accounts were caught within minutes of registration.

The company said it has taken down more fake accounts than the number that should not have appeared on Facebook due to "automated attacks" that helped those accounts evade initial detection.

During the first quarter of 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2018, Facebook estimated that about 5 percent of its 2.4 billion monthly active users were fake accounts, an increase of 3 percent to 4 percent over the number recorded in its previous similar report released in November 2018.

Facebook also said that in the first quarter of 2019, it removed or detected 1.8 billion pieces of spam, 11.1 million pieces of terror-related content, 7.3 million posts containing hate speech, and 52.3 million pieces of graphic or violent content.

The Menlo Park, California-based company said it tolerates no content depicting sexual exploitation of children, and it took action on 5.4 million pieces of content in the first quarter of 2019, down from 6.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2018.

Facebook said those posts were detected more proactively as it increased the use of artificial intelligence technology such as machine learning, in addition to human review of online content.

Facebook has in recent months been under mounting pressure from both the public and federal regulators to step up control of bad content, including misinformation, hate, violence and racism, on its platform.