Journalists Turn to Scribd in Fort Hood Shooting

The online writing site Scribd has been in the news over the last day as someone with the same name as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan–the suspect held after yesterday’s mass shooting at Fort Hood–had posted an essay about suicide bombings on the site.

The NY Times joined seven other news outlets writing about a FBI investigation into the work of a Scribd poster with the same name as the shooting suspect: “In one posting on the Web site Scribd, a man named Nidal Hasan compared the heroism of a soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect fellow soldiers to suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to protect Muslims.”

Based on this newspaper speculation, the essay has been read over 4,000 times and generated 44 comments on Scribd, most of them from readers debating the identity of the essay writer. However, a simple SuperPages search turned up six different people named Nidal Hasan around the United States. As these online writing communities grow, they will invariably be mixed up in news stories–but it is difficult to connect these online personalities to a real writer.

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