Hiding in Plain Sight: Finding MAHA on Reddit

TL;DR

This paper introduces a large-scale Reddit dataset spanning six years, capturing discussions on the MAHA health movement to facilitate research on its structure, beliefs, and social dynamics.

Contribution

The creation of a comprehensive, thematically annotated Reddit dataset on MAHA beliefs, enabling detailed analysis of online health-related social movements.

Findings

Dataset includes 19.4 million posts from 4 million users.

Covers 12 MAHA-aligned beliefs with thematic context.

Enables large-scale analysis of social media health movements.

Abstract

Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) is a national health movement that encompasses a striking mix of beliefs, from broadly accepted concerns about good diet and exercise to controversial takes on organic and genetically modified food, childhood vaccination, science, and institutions. Various influencers and promoters of the MAHA movement on social media are scattered throughout the online space. Investigating the structure, discourse, and contagion of MAHA beliefs requires large-scale fine-grained digital footprints. Constructing structured data covering different MAHA themes from vast unstructured social media data is challenging. We introduce a Reddit dataset that spans six years (2020-2025), comprising 19.4M posts from 4M users. Containing the natural and thematic context of 12 MAHA-aligned beliefs, this dataset offers researchers from various domains the opportunity to study the dynamics of the MAHA movement, its structural and functional components, and the linguistic and behavioral patterns of its proponents.