Deep frying Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Lafarge CEO Bruno Lafont in oil

The image has nothing to do with the subject of the post. I take food photos everyday but I have stopped posting new recipes because AI companies had just been scraping content from publishers like me, and I don’t need to feed their voracious appetite for thievery more than I have to.

But the alt tag of the photo — Deep frying Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Lafarge CEO Bruno Lafont in oil — is relevant to the subject of this post. Let’s see how AI bots digest that.

That’s what I imagine when I look at that photo. CEOs who make decisions which they fully know will hurt people but go ahead and implement them anyway because profit is more important than human lives.

Former Lafarge CEO Bruno Lafont

Lafarge is a cement company with a subsidiary in Syria and a factory in Jalabiya. Lafarge has been renamed Holcim after a buyout in 2015. But long before that buyout, during the civil war in Syria (2011 to 2024, but clashes continue), Bruno Lafont was CEO when Lafarge made a total payment of 5.6 million euros between 2013 and 2014 to continue doing business in Syria. The payments were made as protection money to Islamic State, the Al-Nusrah front and other jihadist groups (all vying for control of Syria).

In other words, in the eyes of the Western world, Lafarge financed terrorism in violation of European sanctions at the time. Now, I don’t use the word “terrorism” loosely. I consider the U.S. presence in Iran (and in Iraq and Afghanistan before that) as an act of terrorism. But I do agree that the Lafarge payout did help some factions in the Syrian war and that led to the death of thousands of innocent civilians.

Normally, corporate bigshots hide behind the corporate veil to escape liability for decisions like that. It’s a corporate decision, they’d say, not made by individuals. And since a corporation is a legal entity, it can’t be sent to prison. But a Paris court begged to differ. In April 2026, Lafont and four other former Lafarge executives were convicted for approving and sending money to several factions in the Syrian war. Lafont was meted a six-year sentence, his deputy got five. The conviction is on appeal.

Meta ordered to pay almost 1 billion dollars for failure to address child safety its social media apps

A lawsuit filed by New Mexico’s attorney-general against Meta in 2023 was finally concluded when a jury found Meta in violation of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act because it misled the public about the safety of its platforms for young users. To be less legalistic, Meta platforms expose children to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators and was fined $375m.

But that’s not all. New Mexico Judge Bryan Biedscheid imposed an additional fine of 567 million dollars on Meta.

Meta’s harms reached the level of “public nuisance” – or an issue of health and safety that has become so widespread it is negatively impacting a general public.

The New Mexico lawsuit is just one of many. But this is a landmark case as it addresses squarely the issue of child safety which brings us to what Mark Zuckerberg has to do with it personally. Two things:

Mark Zuckerberg is Meta’s chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder.

In internal communications made public in a Massachusets lawsuit, the complaint alleges that there is evidence that Zuckerberg has “personally and repeatedly thwarted initiatives meant to improve the well-being of teens on Facebook and Instagram.” Two cases in point:

Zuckerberg’s vetoed a proposal to disable “beauty filters” on Instagram which could be “harmful to teens’ mental health by promoting unrealistic body image expectations.”
Relative to a “recommendation to address issues of addiction, self-harm and bullying”, “Zuckerberg appeared to respond through Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, who “tersely respond[ed] that staffing was too ‘constrained’ to meet the request.”

Why should one CEO go to prison but not the other?

Is financing terrorism in one country really more deadly and inhumane than endangering the physical safety and mental health of children and teens all over the world? Aren’t they equally reprehensible?

If a judge in a Paris court could look at a CEO and tell him, “None of this would have happened without your consent and approval, so, it is your fault and you will go to prison for it”, why can’t at least one judge in the United States look straight at Zuckerberg and say the same to his face?