A video shows a black, Muslim man pushing a child from a platform onto train tracks in a racist attack in France.
This is false, and not what the video shows. A woman named Brianna Lace Workman was charged over the incident which occurred in Oregon in the United States in 2022.
Warning: links in this article contain potentially upsetting footage.
A video shared 1,000 times in a now-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter) falsely claims to show a “Muslim black man” throwing a “white kid” onto train tracks in France.
Screenshots of the post have also been circulating on Facebook.
The caption with the video says: “Muslim black man throws a white kid on the tracks of the train in France, to kill him because the kid is white and the atacker [sic] is a racist and a criminal. Images NOT shown in the media which is a fat liar. It is our duty to show the truth, follow us to support”.
However, the video does not show what is claimed in the post and a woman has since been charged in relation to it.
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In the footage an individual is seen sitting on a bench behind a woman and child along with several other passengers on a station platform.
The person, wearing a red hat, suddenly stands up and pushes the child off the platform onto the tracks, before sitting back down.
But contrary to the claim, the incident occurred in Portland, Oregon in the United States on 28 December 2022, not in France.
According to the District Attorney Office, a woman called Brianna Lace Workman had been arraigned for allegedly shoving the child off the platform onto the train tracks.
A police photo issued of Ms Workman confirms that she is not a black man. Court records stated she was living in a homeless shelter at the time of the incident.
The then 32-year-old was arraigned on charges of attempted assault in the first degree, assault in the third degree, interfering with public transportation, disorderly conduct in the second degree and recklessly endangering another person.
The child reported a severe headache and had a small red mark on their forehead after the incident, the District Attorney’s (DA) statement said.
A hearing on 31 January 2023 at Multnomah County court ruled that Ms Workman was mentally fit to stand trial over the charges.
The DA’s office told Full Fact a further hearing on 20 June 2023 found her unfit to proceed, but she was subsequently found fit to proceed on 14 November 2023. Her next scheduled court date is 31 January this year.
Miscaptioned videos like these further the spread of misinformation. We’ve previously written about a video implying it was of a recent earthquake in Japan, and footage which was falsely claimed to show an Israeli police officer strangling a Palestinian child to death.
It’s always worth checking if social media images and videos are what they say they are before you share them. We’ve written a guide on how to verify videos here.
Image courtesy of photoberry77
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video falsely claims to show an incident in France involving a Muslim man, when it is of a woman allegedly pushing a child off a platform in Oregon in the United States.
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