Facebook co-founder amplifies warning over monopoly and Mark Zuckerberg

Days after calling on the US government to break up Facebook, one of the company’s co-founders amplified his concerns over the level of Mark Zuckerberg’s sway across the social media empire and its billions of users.

“Zuckerberg has too much power — near-unilateral power,” Chris Hughes, 35, who started Facebook with

Zuckerberg when they were students at Harvard University, said in an interview to air Sunday on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.

“We all make mistakes, but I think that in his case it is different because there is no accountability for those mistakes,” Hughes said.

Hughes thrust himself into the centre of a debate over how Washington should regulate the social media giant when he penned an op-ed on May 9 in the New York Times calling Facebook a monopoly that never should have been allowed to buy Instagram and WhatsApp.

Many observers already expect the Federal Trade Commission to slap the company with a fine of as much as $5bn as part of a settlement over revelations that it let Cambridge Analytica obtain data on millions of Facebook users without consent.

But during his interview with CNN, Hughes said the company’s issues run far deeper than one scandal. The problems, he said, stem in part from a lack of accountability for Zuckerberg and a board that’s generally unable to check the billionaire chair and CEO .

“Mark’s the CEO, there is a board but because he owns 60% of the voting shares he’s not accountable really to that board,” said Hughes, who is now co-chair of the Economic Security Project, a group focused on anti-poverty programmes.

“It works more like a board of advisers than anything else.”

Facebook did not immediately respond to an e-mailed message requesting comment on Hughes’s latest remarks. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg said on Friday, after meeting with France President Emmanuel Macron, that his company would work with the governments to determine what content is acceptable on social media networks.

Critics in Europe as well as the US have blasted Facebook over how it handles personal data and hate speech. Hughes told CNN he has not spoken to Zuckerberg since his New York Times piece was published.

“I doubt that I will,” he said.

• Bloomberg