Islamabad: Many Pakistanis expressed supportive sentiments towards their Indian neighbor’s when the people were under a severe second wave of Covid-19, said an artificial intelligence (AI) driven study.
Led by Ashique KhudaBukhsh, the team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) based their study on 300,000 tweets.
The team researched only on the tweets with the three biggest trending hashtags: #IndiaNeedsOxygen, #PakistanStandsWithIndia and #EndiaSaySorryToKashmir.
Among them, 55,712 tweets came from Pakistan, 46,651 were from India and the remaining were posted from the different parts of the world.
The researchers focused on tweets expressing kindness, empathy and support from the people.
It came to be known that most tweets that were posted by Pakistanis citizens between 21 April and 4 May were positive and were in support of Indians, Geo TV reported.
With the help of an artificial intelligence tool, “hope speech classifier”, they found that the Pakistani tweets containing supportive hashtags were by far more than those containing non-supportive hashtags.
The study found that these tweets also received more likes and retweets as well.
The team’s research showed that there’s a universality in how people express emotions.
Our team’s method brings up positive tweets 83 percent of the time, KhudaBukhsh said.
If you search randomly, you will find positive tweets a few around 44 percent of the time.
More than 85 percent of the tweets which were posted on Twitter about the 2nd wave of Covid crisis in India from Pakistan were supportive, the study found.
At the time when all the Indians were panicking and suffering from the raging Covid-19 second wave, they received support and solidarity from different parts of the border.
Few people said Pakistan’s helpful support is as the country itself had also faced an infectious outbreak.
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“Any pandemic doesn’t see borders, whether they are geographical or ideological.”
And when the dark cloud is mocking at you, there’s no harm if you share a prayer.
The condition here was pretty bad too. Our hope was getting thinner and thinner.
Our enemy was the same, our borders are so near and we get affected by whatever happens, said Prof Arifa Zehra, who teaches history in Lahore.
Prof Arifa Zehra also said these positive tweets as the greatest reassurance that we still show humanity even after hatred.
KhudaBukhsh showed hope for better relations between communities and countries if this method of recognising and amplifying positive messages is employed.
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When a country is going through a national health crisis like a severe pandemic, words of hope can be a welcome medicine for mental health and the last thing you want to see is negativity, he highlighted.
KhudaBukhsh recommended using this AI-driven method to curb hate speech. When there’s a negative condition likewise in times of war or a health crisis, instead of stopping the content, an alternative approach can be to highlight the positive content, he concluded.
There are many studies that show that if you are exposed to too much hate speech or negativity contents, you get influenced by it.
It will help reinforce the belief that people on the other side of the borders are kinder.
Khuda Bukhsh also proposed that building up a robustness system that brings kindness in others before an opposite system is installed that it may censor empathetic content.