Final ENDURE project event: Studying Pandemic Resilience for Better Futures in Social Media

The ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience and New Governance Modalities in a PostPandemic World project's HEPP team presents the Finnish Research Council co-funded Trans-Atlantic Platform project's work in the HEPP seminar and the Think Corner 19 May, and the collaborative work at HSSH Brown Bag seminar 21 May.
Studying Pandemic Resilience for Better Futures in Social Media

ENDURE-hankkeen loppuseminaari maanantaina 19.5. 2025 

The ENDURE (ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience and New Governance Modalities in a PostPandemic World) project as part of the HEPP Seminar Series. 

Monday, 19 May, 14:00–16:00 

Location: Snellmania (Unioninkatu 37) 1066 

Seminar: ENDURE – Studying Pandemic Resilience for Better Futures in Social Media 

  • Introduction to the ENDURE project - Emilia Palonen 
  • Methodology - ACDT - Emilia Palonen, Juha Koljonen, Kleber Carrilho, Virpi Salojärvi 
  • Finnish data Twitter - Juha Koljonen and Emilia Palonen 
  • Comparisons with the other countries (including Brazil, of course) - Kleber Carrilho and all 
  • Transnational study of crisis, journalism and communication - Virpi Salojärvi 
  • Final words on crisis and post-pandemic resilience 

Afterwards, you are invited to join us for a special Finnish-themed evening event at Tiedekulma 17:00-19:00, where we host the Human Rights Committee of the Finnish Academies in our seminar that gives the Risto Pelkonen Human Rights Award: It's themed with Vaccinations (see in the sidebar).

 A more methods-focused presentation of the LMM pipeline developed will be given as a HSSH Brown Bag Seminar on 12.15-13 Wednesday 21 May 2025 (on site Fabianinkatu 24, 5th floor, and Online) in collaboration with Tomi Toivio and Alexander Alekseev. 

We hope to see you there for discussion and reflections on the findings and future directions of the project. 

Introduction to HEPP’s research in ENDURE and the themes of the seminar

The pandemic provided an opportunity to study crisis preparedness and resilience in different societies. One of the initiatives was the Trans-Atlantic Platform funded consortia in which the Finnish Research Council of Finland took part. A team at the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism and Polarisation, led by Emilia Palonen, participated in the ENDURE consortium, led by FU Berlin (PI: Mihai Varga), which examines how societies responded to the COVID-19 crisis across Europe and beyond. The HEPP core team, Kleber Carrilho and Juha Koljonen, worked on communication dynamics and resilience in digital platforms, drawing from four different national contexts and datasets: Brazil, Germany, Poland and Finland. Additionally, Virpi Salojärvi brought a global media perspective, with our visiting researcher Saman Choudary also providing policy advice from her WHO study. 

During the project, the team developed the Anarcho-Computational Discourse Theoretical (AC/DT) methodology, a novel approach that combines critical discourse theory with big data tools. Using this framework, we analysed political conflict and digital meaning-making on social media platforms, specifically X/Twitter. Koljonen and Palonen had already been working on an interpretive and instrumentalist approach to large social media datasets. They expanded on this work in ENDURE, also offering a basis for a large European comparison of the EP elections on short-video format platforms: TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. 

Regarding the pandemic, the HEPP ENDURE team analysed a Finnish Twitter debate around mask policies, lockdowns, and public health discourse, revealing how trust, polarisation, and policy narratives happened over time and interacted with diverse responses in data collected between 2020 and 2022. In a comparative collaborative study with Poland, Germany, and Brazil, researchers examined the differences and overlaps in social media discourse and government communication during the pandemic. Based on Twitter, these studies analysed how populist performances, polarisation, misinformation, and crisis narratives emerged across contexts. This four-country dataset was used for topic-modelling and the pre-analysed data will be made available for further research. The Finnish data showed an interaction between the public and powerholders and the emergence of an anti-mask discourse in the second year of the pandemic. The citizens called for more intervention and monitored each other’s mask usage. The pandemic also enabled transnational comparisons, which were discussed online.  

In Brazil, our articles and papers highlighted how ideological and electoral discourse hijacked official communication (Ministry of Health social media accounts, for example), particularly under President Jair Bolsonaro. A key moment analysed was the start of the national vaccination campaign, which became a battleground for anti-science strategies. These included both attempts to suppress news about vaccination altogether and efforts to discredit the vaccine, which was developed through a partnership between a Brazilian institution and a Chinese pharmaceutical company. A comparison between Brazil and Finland revealed how the two countries, beyond their demographic and democratic differences, had fundamentally different approaches to government communication structures and the use of social media by institutions and leadership figures. These differences shaped the flow of public information and the emotional and political dynamics of pandemic discourses.   

Salojärvi’s work approaches the global COVID-19 pandemic from a grassroots perspective, asking what we can learn from it. The specific focus is on two different groups - journalists and micro companies - and on the forms of resilience these two groups performed. The findings are drawn from in-depth studies on Venezuelan journalists and North American and Finnish micro companies’ crowdfunding campaigns. In addition, her work discusses the emotional impact of the pandemic through the case study of journalists. 

The study of the pandemic started in 2022, and some of the research also dealt with the crisis that the Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine presented. Further research from the team is related to that. Yannick Lahti and Emilia Palonen have been working on the Finns Party’s resilience in the face of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the post-pandemic elections, and Virpi Salojärvi has been working on crowd-funding platforms in Ukraine and Brazilian social media educators addressing the war. 

Think Corner Event

Rohkeutta rokotteilla? Terveystiede ja ihmisoikeudet

Tiedekulma

Rokotteet ovat yksi lääketieteen suurimmista saavutuksista, mutta samalla ne ovat herättäneet epäluuloa ja vastustusta. Tilaisuudessa keskustellaan rokotteiden merkityksestä tieteellisestä, yhteiskunnallisesta ja eettisestä näkökulmasta. Miten rokotteet liittyvät globaaliin terveysoikeudenmukaisuuteen, millaisia haasteita ja vastustusta ne kohtaavat, sekä kuinka voimme rakentaa luottamusta tiedettä ja terveydenhuoltoa kohtaan?

Tilaisuudessa pohdimme myös WHO:n roolia ja sitä, miten rokotteiden jakelu, saatavuus ja niitä koskeva tutkimus liittyvät globaaliin terveysoikeudenmukaisuuteen ja ihmisoikeuksiin. Koronapandemian aikana syntynyt yhteiskunnallinen resilienssi kriiseissä ja kriisiviestintä on ollut myös kansainvälisen tutkimuksen kohde. Esittelemme tuoreen Suomen Akatemian ENDURE-hankeen tuloksia siitä, miten viranomaisten, asiantuntijoiden ja laajan yleisön välinen vuoropuhelu näkyi Suomessa sekä Puolassa, Saksassa ja Brasiliassa.

Tilaisuudessa julkistetaan Suomen Tiedeakatemiain Risto Pelkonen -ihmisoikeuspalkinnon saaja. Neljättä kertaa jaettava palkinto myönnetään tieteentekijöiden ihmisoikeuksia tai tieteen vapautta edistävästä toiminnasta.
 

Ohjelma:

Avaussanat, professori Mikko Hupa, Suomen Tiedeakatemiat
Suomen Tiedeakatemiain Risto Pelkonen -ihmisoikeuspalkinto, professori Liisa Laakso
Palkinnonsaajan puheenvuoro
Paneelikeskustelu
Puheenjohtajana professori (em.) Markku Kivinen, Helsingin yliopisto
Panelistit: Erikoissuunnittelija, väitöskirjatutkija Idil Hussein, Terveyden ja hyvinvoinnin laitos; ohjelmajohtaja Emilia Palonen, Helsingin yliopisto; dosentti Virpi Salojärvi, Helsingin yliopisto; ylilääkäri Topi Turunen, Länsi-Uudenmaan hyvinvointialue
Tapahtuman järjestää Suomen Tiedeakatemiain Ihmisoikeuskomitea ja ENDURE hanke