New York (AFP)

Increasingly urgent calls for the dismantling of Facebook represent an "existential" threat to the company, according to its boss Mark Zuckerberg, who says he is ready to "go to war" and "to sue the state" to avoid it, according to the specialized site the Verge.

The media claims to have recovered the recording of a Q & A session held by the co-founder with employees in July, during which the leader discusses various topics including the repeated attacks of Elizabeth Warren, the rising star of the Democratic primary for the 2020 presidential election.

"Someone like Elizabeth Warren thinks the solution is to dismantle businesses," he said. "If she is elected president, I bet we will have a fight, and I bet we will win," he added.

"I do not want to start a major lawsuit against our own government," said Zuckerberg. "But in the end, if someone tries to threaten something existential, you go to battle and you fight".

Tech giants like Facebook or Google are facing several investigations for anti-competitive practices launched by some US states and are also in the sights of European authorities. Grievances against them are numerous, from the protection of personal data to the grip on the advertising market.

But dismantling these giants will not diminish for example the risk of interference in elections, according to Zuckerberg. On the contrary, "because companies can no longer coordinate and work together".

This will not reduce the hate attacks problems either because all the procedures put in place will be "more fragmented".

Twitter for example faces the same types of problems as Facebook but "our investment in security is more important than their turnover," he said.

In a hurry of questions, the Facebook boss also discussed the fact that he did not attend a hearing before the British parliament. "When problems arose with Cambridge Analytica last year, I went to hearings in the United States, (...) in the European Union, but it would be foolish for me to go to all the country hearings. who want to see me, "he said.

He also mentioned the development of a new application called Lasso, supposed to compete with the popular Chinese video application TikTok.

Contacted by AFP, the group did not immediately react to the distribution of these comments.

© 2019 AFP