Al-Hashimi says Iraq's online anti-IS movement can be split into three main groups. “The first one is comprised of educated locals who already have well-established social media accounts and who may also have done some blogging,” he told NIQASH. “These people have been able to leave a clear record and in fact, many have been diarying events around the country, presenting facts about what's happening from on the ground.”
These sites include the blogger known as Mosul Eye – which seems quite likely to be a group of people operating together – and Anbar Daily.
A further category consists of online Iraqis who have partisan interests at the heart of what they're posting and the information they're sending out. Often they promote inaccurate information and propaganda; for example, they may only publish information that is in complete support of Shiite Muslim militias, who have played a valuable role in fighting against extremists but whose behaviour has also been problematic in some cases.
A third category of Iraqis online are those who mostly re-tweet or re-post news. They mostly use official news sources – which again, are not always unbiased or completely accurate. Nonetheless these locals could be considered mostly as promoters of news, al-Hashimi suggests.
Indicating how seriously Iraqis are starting to take the online battle against the extremists is another organisation, Iraqi Media House. In February the media monitoring organisation, headed by respected Iraqi editor, Mushreq Abbas of the Al Hayat news agency in Iraq, released a report on how the IS group has managed to use the Internet to disseminate its messages.
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