The decision was made to "prevent them from using our service to further inflame ethnic and religious tensions," Facebook said. The company said it was preserving data from the deleted accounts and pages.

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Facebook previously removed the pages of nationalist monks and has hired a company to assess the effects of the platform on human rights in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Facebook has faced increasing pressure to stem hate speech on its platform, which has wide reach in Myanmar. The three-person UN fact-finding mission, which began working last year to gather evidence of crimes by the military, singled out Facebook's role as a tool for spreading hate speech.

"Facebook has been a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate, in a context where for most users Facebook is the internet," the report said. "Although improved in recent months, Facebook's response has been slow and ineffective."

The UN team is set to present a fuller report on September 18.

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Shortly after the preliminary report was made public, Min Aung Hlaing's page became inaccessible. Another Facebook account for him surfaced a few hours later; only to be taken down.

The general has been a prolific user of Facebook in recent years, using the platform to document his travels and post updates on military affairs. The platform has also allowed the Myanmar military to provide a counter-narrative to the mounting evidence of crimes committed against the Rohingya.

The UN team has collected numerous Facebook posts from Myanmar military accounts, according to a person briefed on the group's work who was not authorised to talk to the media. Observers have said that a body of evidence gleaned from the platform could be used to support an investigation of genocide or crimes against humanity.

Facebook also said that it discovered and removed 46 pages and 12 accounts engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behaviour."

"During a recent investigation, we discovered that they used seemingly independent news and opinion Pages to covertly push the messages of the Myanmar military," the company said.

A spokeswoman for the company declined to provide further details on those pages and accounts, citing ongoing work to identify any other related activity. Naming the pages, she said, could hamper these efforts.

A spokesman for the military did not respond to a request for comment. Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Myanmar's civilian government, said it was "questionable" that Facebook's actions occurred on the same day as the release of the UN report, which his government rejects. Myanmar has put in a query to Facebook officials, he added.

Naing Swe Oo, director of the Thayninga Institute for Strategic Studies, a military-backed think tank whose Facebook page has remained active, condemned Facebook's actions.

"Taking down the Facebook pages of Tatmadaw leaders and others [the same day as the UN report] is unfair, one-side and coordinated," he said, using Myanmar's name for its military.

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Facebook is wildly popular in Myanmar, where internet connectivity has exploded in the past six years after the previous military-linked government ended a state-run monopoly on telecommunications that had kept the Southeast Asian country largely offline. In 2011, Myanmar had 1.3 million cellphone subscribers, and internet penetration was below 1 per cent, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency.

The liberalisation of the telecom sector in 2014 sent the price of SIM cards crashing from more than $US1000 to just a few dollars. Internet penetration has risen to about 25 per cent and cellphone penetration to around 90 per cent, according to the ITU. There are around 18 million Facebook users in the country, the company said.

For years, Facebook relied heavily on a network of civil society organisations that flagged content for review. The system drew criticism from those involved, who said it was too slow, could not be sufficiently scaled up and outsourced work that should have been done by the company.

Facebook was also long resistant to disclosing the number of Myanmar-language speakers it had monitoring content for possible violations of the company's community standards. This month, the company announced that it was formalising the escalation channel and said it had more than 60 Myanmar-language experts reviewing content as of June.

With Shibani Mahtani, Wai Moe

Washington Post