Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Says Breaking It Up Won’t Solve the Problems

(Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said calls to break up the social networking giant aren't unfair, but that doing so won't solve the company's biggest problems.

"Those are the right questions, and the question is what's the right answer. I think the right answer is to set up the right rules for the internet," Sandberg said in an interview Friday morning on CNBC. "You could break us up, you could break other tech companies up, but you actually don't address the underlying issues people are concerned about."

Sandberg said that the tech industry's most pressing problems, like election security and privacy, are issues that all tech companies face, regardless of size. This is why, Sandberg added, Facebook has been actively calling for tech regulation in Washington and in Europe.

"We also know that we can't do it alone," she said.

Calls to break up Facebook have intensified in recent months. Several presidential hopefuls, including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have argued for a Facebook split, and so did Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and former college roommate of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kurt Wagner in San Francisco at kwagner71@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Molly Schuetz, Alistair Barr

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