Facebook Inc. co-founder Chris Hughes is working with the U.S. government on how to break up the company, according to a new report Thursday from the New York Times.

Hughes (pictured) is said to be collaborating with two leading antitrust academics, Scott Hemphill of New York University and Tim Wu of Columbia University, and has met with the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general on a proposal to break up the world’s leading social network.

It’s no surprise that Hughes — who worked with Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook in a dorm room at Harvard University and became the company’s first spokesperson before cashing out his shares in 2007 — is now anti-Facebook.

He wrote a lengthy op-ed for the Times in May arguing that while he liked Zuckerberg personally, Facebook itself had become an Orwellian monster of unchecked power over social media platforms that can affect the way we think, influence elections and manipulate the zeitgeist. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes said at the time.

The case Hughes is leading against Facebook, particularly with the FTC, is that the company has made “serial defensive acquisitions” to protect its dominant position in the market for social networks, giving it an unfair market advantage when it comes to advertising pricing as well as lowering the quality of the user experience.

News of Hughes’ collaboration with government departments comes after the Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it had launched an antitrust investigation into Facebook along with Google LLC, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. for “monopolistic activities.”

According to the department, the investigation will review “whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation or otherwise harmed consumers.”

“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division said in a statement.

The fact that Hughes, with his insider knowledge, is assisting in the investigation is certainly not helpful for any counter-arguments Facebook may put forward, particularly given his on-the-record opinion of the company.

“Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability,” Hughes said in his op-ed. “This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.”

He added, “Imagine a competitive market in which [Americans] could choose among one network that offered higher privacy standards, another that cost a fee to join but had little advertising and another that would allow users to customize and tweak their feeds as they saw fit.”

Photo: revenudebase/Flickr