July 2, 2021: Perhaps not surprisingly, in recent years, fractious relations between India and Pakistan, historical opponents, have spilled over onto social media.
But in late April, as India struggled with a tremendous second wave of Covid19, citizens on both sides of the border took to their heels in support of pro-hashtags such as #India needs oxygen and #Pakistan stands with India.
Experts say it is well known that auxiliary hashtags do not always mean positive tweets – users often “hijack” anything from trolling to wish a cricketer or Bollywood star a happy birthday.
But an artificial intelligence (AI) study looked at thousands of Pakistani tweets published between April 21 and May 4 and said that a tremendous number were indeed positive. 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.
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.
His study found that tweets containing supportive hashtags, which originated in Pakistan, had a large number of unsupported hashtags and a large number of likes and tweets. Their approach also promotes positive tweets, making it easier to find them quickly.
“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,” Mr KhudaBukhsh said.
In late April and early May, as soon as Indian hospitals were out of bed, people died of breathlessness from shortage of oxygen, and funeral pyres burned 24 hours a day, with significant support and solidarity from across the border.
One reason for this may be that the epidemic in Pakistan is getting worse, says Professor Arifah Zahra, who teaches history in Lahore. “The situation here was very bad, our hopes were getting thinner and thinner. Our enemy was the same, our borders are very close and we are affected by whatever happens.” But, Professor Zahra says, looking at all these positive messages, “I got an emotional feeling – it’s the biggest assurance that we are still human. A pandemic does not recognize borders, whether they are geographical or ideological. And when the dark cloud is mocking you, then there is nothing wrong with praying.”
And that’s what Pakistani twitter users did.
“Our prayers and Our sympathies are with you. We are Neighbours not Enemies,” wrote one:
“We are neighbours not enemies. We are rivals not opponents. We have boundaries but not in our hearts,” wrote another:
“Heartbreaking to see this situation in our neighbourhood. Send love and prayers from Pakistan. May Almighty Allah help humanity through this pandemic,” tweeted a third:
Mr KhudaBukhsh says their method of identifying and amplifying positive messages can help boost public morale and also improve relations between communities and countries. “When a country is going through a national health crisis like a pandemic, words of hope can be a welcome medicine and the last thing you want to see is negativity. There are several studies that show that if you’re exposed to too much hate speech or negative content, you get influenced by it.”
Their method, he says, can be used to combat hate speech.
“When there’s a negative situation, such as in times of war or a health crisis, instead of blocking the content, an alternative approach can be to highlight the positive content. It will help reinforce the belief that people on the other side of the aisle are kinder.” Any kind of speech filtering can be used to manipulate the web space, Mr KhudaBukhsh says.
“It can be adapted to censor empathetic content and that’s why care is needed before these systems are deployed. Our job is to build a robust system.”
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