Facebook announced Thursday that it removed more than 2 billion fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019, a dramatic increase from years prior. The social-media platform, which has about 2.38 billion monthly active users, also said it disabled 1.2 billion fake accounts in the last three months of 2018. “For fake accounts, the amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time,” the company said in a blog post on community standards. Facebook said most of the accounts were caught “within minutes of registration, before they became a part of our monthly active user (MAU) population.” An estimated 5 percent of monthly active accounts are fake, according to the company.