The co-founder of Facebook is calling for the government to break up the tech giant in an op-ed article published in The New York Times Thursday morning.

"The Facebook that exists today is not the Facebook that we founded in 2004," Chris Hughes, who started Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in their Harvard dorm, told NBC News following the publication of his op-ed article on the same topic.

"And the one that we have today I think is far too big. It's far too powerful. And most importantly, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is not accountable," Hughes said of his former business partner, whom he still called a "friend."

"I have been friends with Mark and a lot of the other folks at Facebook for a long time. And you know, who knows? We may still be friends, we may not be friends. There are some kinds of friends that you can have disagreements with. And then there are some friends that you can't," Hughes said.

Hughes joins a growing chorus of privacy advocates and politicians from the right and the left, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a presidential candidate, and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who have called for federal antitrust action against Facebook.

The mood in Washington has soured against the former tech darling in recent years following the leaks of millions of its users' personal information and the disclosure that its platform had been manipulated by Russian propagandists to spread misinformation and undermine democracy.