Facebook revealed Tuesday that it removed more than half a billion fake accounts and millions of pieces of violent or obscene content during the first three months of 2018, pledging more transparency while shielding its chief executive from new public questioning about the company's business practices.

"My top priorities this year are keeping people safe and developing new ways for our community to participate in governance and holding us accountable.

Last month, we published our internal guidelines that our teams use to review posts for hate speech, violence, nudity, terrorism, and other content we don't allow.

Today, for the first time, we're releasing a transparency report on the effectiveness of our enforcement. This report includes the same metrics we use internally to measure our progress. We'll update it twice a year with our results and you can read the first report here: https://transparency.facebook.com/

In the report, you'll see that in the first three months of this year we took down 837 million pieces of spam and disabled 583 million fake accounts. Thanks to AI tools we've built, almost all of the spam was removed before anyone reported it, and most of the fake accounts were removed within minutes of being registered.

We have a lot more work to do. AI still needs to get better before we can use it to effectively remove more linguistically nuanced issues like hate speech in different languages, but we're working on it. As we do, we look forward to sharing our progress with you," - wrote Mark Zuckerberg.