AI shows Pakistani Twitter prayed for India during Covid crisis

An artificial intelligence (AI)-driven study looked at thousands of tweets from Pakistan posted between 21 April and 4 May and said that an overwhelming number of them were for India as the country was facing a Covid crisis. 

Researchers, led by Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US, used machine learning tools to identify the tweets that expressed kindness, empathy and solidarity, reports the BBC.

They collected 300,000 tweets with three biggest trending hashtags: #IndiaNeedsOxygen, #PakistanStandsWithIndia and #EndiaSaySorryToKashmir - the last a reference to the long-running dispute over the Himalayan territory. Of these, 55,712 tweets were from Pakistan, 46,651 were from India and the remaining were from around the world.

The researchers then ran the text from these tweets into a "hope speech classifier" - a language processing tool that helps detect positive comments. They looked for patterns to identify if the text had "hostility-diffusing positive hope speech", or words like prayer, empathy, distress and solidarity.Their study found that tweets containing supportive hashtags originating in Pakistan heavily outnumbered those containing non-supportive hashtags and also had substantially more likes and retweets. Their method also amplified the positive tweets, making it easier to find them quickly.

At the end of April, as India struggled with a ferocious second wave of Covid-19, citizens on both side of the border shelved their barbs in favour of supportive hashtags like #IndiaNeedsOxygen and #PakistanStandsWithIndia.

"Our research showed that there's a universality in how people express emotions. If you search randomly, you'll find positive tweets a little over 44% of the time. Our method throws up positive tweets 83% of the time," KhudaBukhsh said.

In end-April and early-May, as Indian hospitals ran out of beds, people died gasping for oxygen and funeral pyres burned round the clock, there was a significant outpouring of support and solidarity from people across the border.

One reason could be that the outbreak in Pakistan was also getting serious, says Prof Arifa Zehra, who teaches history in Lahore.

"The situation here was pretty bad too, our hope was getting thinner and thinner. Our enemy was the same, our borders are so close and we get impacted by whatever happens."

But, Zehra says, seeing all those positive messages "gave me a warm feeling - it was the greatest reassurance that we are still human".

"A pandemic doesn't recognise borders, whether they are geographical or ideological. And when the dark cloud is sneering at you, then there's no harm is sharing a prayer."