#MakeBeefGreatAgain: A Cross-Platform Analysis of Early #MAHA Discourse

TL;DR

This study analyzes early #MAHA discourse across platforms, revealing a significant disconnect from the campaign's stated priorities and highlighting how slogans are reinterpreted in digital environments.

Contribution

It provides a large-scale, cross-platform analysis of #MAHA discourse, revealing platform-specific differences and the divergence from official campaign priorities.

Findings

81.3% of posts did not engage with campaign priorities

Discourse clustered into grassroots, informational, and health spaces

#MAHA functioned more as a symbolic frame than a unified campaign

Abstract

Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is a health-related campaign slogan proposed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and later incorporated into the political coalition of President Trump. While #MAHA quickly circulated beyond the campaign itself and became a prominent hashtag for public discussion, it remains unclear whether this public discourse reflected, reshaped, or diverged from the stated agenda of the MAHA campaign. This study presents a large-scale, cross-platform analysis of early #MAHA public discourse between September 2024 and January 2025, using the framework of Agenda-Melding Theory. Drawing on 41,819 #MAHA-related posts, this study combines structural topic modeling, interrupted time-series analysis, and AI-assisted data annotation to examine the thematic structure and temporal dynamics. The most prominent finding is the substantial disconnect between #MAHA public discourse and the stated MAHA agenda: 81.3% of posts did not engage any of the five campaign priorities of the MAHA campaign. There were also pronounced cross-platform differences, with online platforms clustering into three broad discourse environments: (a) grassroots partisan-support spaces, (b) informational sources, and (c) health-focused spaces. #MAHA functioned less as a unified campaign agenda than as a symbolic frame interpreted differently across platforms. More broadly, this study provides useful empirical insight into how campaign slogans are reinterpreted and how public agendas are formed, amplified, and transformed in the fragmented digital environments.