I honestly initially read the "it" in this headline to imply "the Government", figuring Facebook finally had enough and was going to try and break down its regulators.
In languages where the gender for government and the one for company differs it would be possible to by succinct and clear.
In Russian e.g., the "it" could be neuter if refering to breaking up the government, or feminine for the company. In Russian it's common to insert the word like company which has an obvious gender, so they would write: a founder of company (fem.) "Facebook", which allows you to then refer to it later using a feminine pronoun. Though if transliterated Facebook would be masculine. (его vs её, though this wouldn't work transliterated since the masculine and neuter accusative share the same pronouns)
French resists this as they don't normally give words like Facebook a gender.
For German it could work. Though I don't often say "the Facebook", if I considered it neuter (the ending being book -> das Buch), I would think my thought process would be obvious to the listener, and therefore you could make this succinct and clear in German too. (sie vs es)
For English I'd include a noun describing what I'm refering to, so: Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break Up the Company (though maybe slightly stilted?)
This is a valid way to read 'it'. The title is written poorly; I've found that, in order to reduce ambiguity in referential language, 'it' should generally refer to the most recent noun(or a most recent noun with 'the' in front). Otherwise the legibility of the writing is lost, such as this title. Admittedly, there's not much way to keep this from reading awkwardly.
I've never heard of that rule. Ambiguous pronouns like this are pretty common in English. In fact, figuring out what the ambiguous pronoun refers to is the basis for the Winograd Schema, a challenge for AI especially relevant to translation tasks [1].
