Advanced research shows people from Pakistan had genuinely prayed for India during its recent catastrophic wave of COVID-19 in April, May this year. Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study in which the group of researchers analyzed trends #IndiaNeedsOxygen and #PakistanStandsWithIndia through methods of Artificial Intelligence.
These Twitter trends had originated during April and May when a deadly wave of coronavirus had gripped India. Reports of the failing health system of India, the massive number of death, people dying due to lack of oxygen, stories of helplessness of the families of COVID-19 patients, and funeral pyre burning dead bodies round the clock had sent shockwaves in Pakistan that was on the edge of the third wave of COVID-19 at that time.
Humanity over anything else ❤️ https://t.co/OC8idQqnKC
— Teja (@tejamusings) July 2, 2021
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Experts said that even the positive trends are often hijacked and people quote random stuff from celebrities to sports events and other things under hashtags. But a detailed analysis through Artificial Intelligence reveals that positive tweets under these trends had outnumbered the negative or irrelevant tweets.
I didn’t ever doubt that emotions/vibes can be conveyed through social media but in all honesty, wish we could say this for India as well 😒 https://t.co/feKGmq7TTt
— Asma Ali Zain (@asmaalizain) July 2, 2021
Researchers collected 300,000 tweets between April 21st and May 4th registered under three big trends- #IndiaNeedsOxygen, #PakistanStandsWithIndia, and #EndiaSaySorryToKashmir. Of these, 55,712 tweets from Pakistan, 46,651 tweets from India, and the rest of the world.
The researcher ran the text of these tweets from the hope speech classifier- a language tool that detects positive comments. The tool looked for ‘hostility-diffusing positive hope speech’ patterns and also words like distress, empathy, solidarity, and others.
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“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,” said Mr. KhudaBukhsh, the head of the research, while talking to BBC. Hence, the results showed people of Pakistan had genuinely prayed for India while keeping aside hostilities and hatred.