Finding Support for India During its COVID-19 Surge

India and Pakistan have fought four wars in the past few decades, but when India faced an oxygen shortage in its hospitals during its recent COVID-19 surge, Pakistan offered to help. Finding these positive tweets, however, was not as easy as simply browsing the supportive hashtags or looking at the most popular posts. And Twitter's algorithm isn't tuned to surface the most positive tweets during a crisis. Ashique KhudaBukhsh of Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute led a team of researchers who used machine learning to identify supportive tweets from Pakistan during India's COVID crisis. In the throes of a public health crisis, words of hope can be welcome medicine.