A Hungarian camerawoman who was caught on video kicking migrants last month is now planning to sue Facebook, as part of effort to clear her name.
Journalist Petra Laszlo is lashing out against the social network for failing to remove threatening groups and messages aimed at her, despite her requests, she told Russian news outlet Izvestia (Russian). Laszlo also claims that Facebook shut down groups that supported her.
“We believe Facebook played a big role in my situation,” Laszlo said in the interview, translated by Quartz. “It helped stir people up against me.”
Laszlo’s actions sparked international outrage in September when footage emerged of her kicking and tripping migrants crossing a border into Hungary from Serbia. She was promptly fired from her job as a camera operator at Hungarian television station N1TV, and is facing criminal charges.
There is a prevailing school of thought that says the social media era is making people more irascible willing to act out. It’s a “chicken or the egg” conversation though. Some of us say that people have always been awful and social media is merely making more people aware of that.
That being said, Facebook has been known to play political favorites, and Laszlo certainly would have been one of theirs.
A good rule of thumb (which I probably fail heeding dozens of times every day): try not to be a jerk.
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