Hiding in Plain Sight: Finding MAHA on Reddit
For researchers studying online health movements, this dataset provides a large-scale, fine-grained resource to analyze MAHA dynamics, but the contribution is primarily a new dataset.
The authors introduce a Reddit dataset spanning 2020-2025 with 19.4M posts from 4M users, annotated for 12 MAHA-aligned beliefs, to enable large-scale study of the MAHA movement's structure, discourse, and contagion.
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.