A giant thumbs-up button marks the entrance to the Facebook campus, located at 1601 Willow Road in Menlo Park, California. Photo: Jason Doiy

The solution to concerns over Facebook's privacy practices isn't breaking up the company, its former general counsel and chief privacy officer told CNBC in a segment Friday morning.

Instead, Chris Kelly, who joined Facebook as its first in-house attorney in 2005, agreed with chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg's Thursday statement that the company's size and resources gives it a better shot at providing a safe and secure platform.

Chris Kelly, Facebook chief privacy officer.

He said companies must “actually have scale in order to address these problems” because of the heavy investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning required to stop the proliferation of misinformation, harmful content or data breaches on a platform.

Kelly's comments are in response to calls for the breakup of Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, which owns social media sites Instagram, WhatsApp and the Facebook platform, from the company's co-founder Chris Hughes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, has also promised antitrust action against Facebook as part of her 2020 presidential campaign.

“One of the things that's missing in a lot of this commentary is understanding that under antitrust law you actually have to prove a monopoly first, and its still not even close to clear that there is one for Facebook here,” Kelly said. “And then from there you have to decide whether a structural remedy is appropriate.”

Kelly added that during his four years at the company Zuckerberg was interested in making Facebook a privacy-focused platform, “it's just not what some people have thought of as privacy.” Facebook's privacy focus, he said, meant allowing users to control who saw their posts but not to “avoid any accountability” for their actions on the site.

Zuckerberg said in March that Facebook would begin moving toward a “privacy-focused vision” for the platform, with encryption, reduced permanence and enhanced safety. Facebook has come under scrutiny since 2016 for a slew of scandal over data breaches, election-related misinformation and the spread of hate speech on its platform.

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