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

This study analyzes 41,819 #MAHA posts across multiple platforms from September 2024 to January 2025 using Agenda-Melding Theory and reveals a significant disconnect where 81.3% of public discourse diverged from the campaign's stated priorities, demonstrating how the slogan functioned as a fragmented symbolic frame rather than a unified agenda.

The Gist

Imagine the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) campaign as a chef who just served up a very specific, five-course menu. The chef's plan was clear: fix chronic diseases, grow food better, protect nature, stop corporate cheating, and remove toxins.

Now, imagine that instead of everyone sitting down to eat that specific menu, the recipe got thrown into a giant, noisy blender made of social media. This study is like a food critic who tasted 41,000 different "smoothies" made from that blender to see what people were actually drinking.

Here is what the study found, broken down simply:

1. The Menu vs. The Smoothie

The biggest surprise was that 81% of the people talking about #MAHA weren't actually talking about the chef's menu at all.

• The Chef's Plan: 5 specific goals (like fixing healthcare or protecting habitats).
• The Public's Reality: Most people used the hashtag as a cheerleading chant or a lifestyle tip.
  • The "Lifestyle" Crowd: People talked about cooking at home, taking supplements, and eating meat.
  • The "Cheerleaders": People used the hashtag just to say, "I love Trump and RFK Jr.!" without mentioning any health policies.
  • The "News" Crowd: People discussed the political appointments and election results.

Only about 1 in 5 posts actually discussed the specific policy goals the campaign promised. It's as if the chef said, "Let's fix the plumbing," but the crowd started shouting, "Let's paint the house red!" and "Let's eat steak!"

2. The Election Day "Flashbulb"

The study looked at how the conversation changed over time, using the 2024 election as a "flashbulb" moment.

• Before and During the Election: The hashtag was mostly about the election itself. It was a political rally cry.
• After the Election: The political cheering died down a bit, but the conversation didn't stop. Instead, it shifted. People started talking more about healthy lifestyles (Topic 1) and health policies (Topic 2).
• The Takeaway: The election was the spark that lit the fire, but once the election was over, the fire burned in a different direction—toward personal health habits rather than just political slogans.

3. Different Rooms, Different Parties

The study found that the hashtag didn't mean the same thing on every social media platform. It's like the same song playing in three different rooms, but the people in each room are dancing to a different beat:

• TikTok (The Gym/Rally Room): This was the loudest room for patriotic cheering. People here were mostly using the hashtag to show support for the political team and share lifestyle tips (like "carnivore diets").
• X (Twitter), YouTube, and Web Articles (The Newsroom): These platforms were more like a news briefing. People here discussed election results, political appointments, and policy details.
• Instagram and Reddit (The Community Center): These spaces were more focused on health discussions, like how to eat better or fix the healthcare system.

4. The "Melding" Theory

The researchers used a theory called "Agenda-Melding." Think of it like a potluck dinner.

• The campaign brings a specific dish (the agenda).
• The news brings a different dish.
• Your friends bring their own dishes.

Instead of just eating what the campaign served, people mixed everything together in their own way. They took the campaign slogan, mixed it with their love for their country, their interest in fitness, and their anger at the news, and created a new, unique flavor. The result was that the original "campaign menu" got lost in the mix.

Summary

In short, the study shows that when a political slogan hits the internet, it rarely stays exactly what the politicians intended. The public grabs the slogan, remixes it, and uses it for their own purposes—whether that's cheering for a team, sharing a diet tip, or discussing news. The hashtag became a flexible symbol that meant something different depending on which "room" (platform) you were in.

Technical Summary

1. Problem Statement

The study investigates the disconnect between a political campaign's stated agenda and the public discourse surrounding its slogan. Specifically, it examines the #MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) campaign, proposed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and integrated into President Trump's coalition. The campaign outlined five specific priorities: tackling chronic disease, advancing regenerative agriculture, protecting natural habitats, exposing corporate corruption, and eliminating environmental toxins.

The core research problem is to determine whether the public discourse on social media reflected, reshaped, or diverged from these stated priorities during the early diffusion phase (September 2024 – January 2025). The authors hypothesize that, consistent with Agenda-Melding Theory (AMT), the public does not passively adopt elite agendas but actively reinterprets them, potentially creating a fragmented discourse that varies significantly across different digital platforms.

2. Methodology

The study employs a large-scale, cross-platform mixed-methods approach combining computational linguistics, statistical time-series analysis, and AI-assisted annotation.

• Data Collection:

  • Sample: $N = 41,819$ unique posts related to #MAHA.
  • Sources: Seven platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), Reddit, YouTube, and web articles.
  • Timeframe: September 5, 2024 (early RFK Jr. usage) to January 10, 2025 (start of Trump's second term), covering the 2024 US Presidential Election.
  • Filtering: Initial collection yielded ~118k posts. After deduplication and AI-assisted relevance filtering (removing non-campaign uses of "MAHA"), the final sample was retained.

• Analytical Techniques:

  1. Structural Topic Modeling (STM): Used to identify latent thematic structures within the text. The model treated topic prevalence as a function of document-level covariates (specifically time) to observe how themes evolved.
  2. Interrupted Time-Series Analysis (ITSA): Used to quantify the impact of the November 5, 2024, election on discourse volume and topic prevalence. Models utilized Generalized Least Squares (GLS) with ARMA correlation structures to account for temporal autocorrelation.
  3. AI-Assisted Annotation: ChatGPT-5.1 was employed to classify posts against the five official campaign priorities. The model was validated against human-coded benchmarks (Cohen's $\kappa \approx 0.88$) with high accuracy ($F1 \approx 0.85$).
  4. Statistical Testing: Pearson chi-square tests and Cramer's V were used to assess associations between topics and platforms, and between topics and campaign agenda alignment.

3. Key Contributions

• Empirical Validation of Agenda-Melding Theory: The study provides large-scale evidence that public discourse does not simply replicate elite campaign agendas. Instead, it demonstrates a "melding" process where the public selectively amplifies certain aspects (lifestyle, patriotism) while suppressing others (specific policy details like habitat preservation).
• Cross-Platform Discourse Ecology: It moves beyond single-platform analysis to map how different digital ecosystems (e.g., TikTok vs. X vs. Web Articles) construct distinct "discourse environments" around the same hashtag.
• Methodological Integration: The paper successfully integrates STM for thematic discovery, ITSA for temporal dynamics, and LLM-based classification for agenda alignment, offering a robust framework for analyzing political health narratives.

4. Key Results

A. Thematic Structure (STM Findings)

Four dominant themes emerged, none of which perfectly aligned with the campaign's five priorities:

1. Patriotic Partisan Support (39.0%): The largest cluster. Focused on slogans, solidarity, and political identity (e.g., "MAGA + MAHA = WIN").
2. Electoral Campaign (23.2%): Focused on endorsements, appointments, and campaign events.
3. Healthy Lifestyle (21.6%): Focused on nutrition, fitness, supplements, and "natural living."
4. Health Policy (16.2%): Focused on systemic issues, regulations, and corporate corruption.

B. Agenda Alignment (The Disconnect)

• Major Divergence: 81.3% of all posts did not engage with any of the campaign's five stated priorities.
• Selective Amplification: Only 18.7% of posts aligned with the agenda. Among those, "Chronic Disease" (Priority 1) was the most discussed, while "Habitat Preservation" (Priority 3) received negligible attention (0.1%).
• Topic-Agenda Mapping:
  • Lifestyle and Policy topics were the primary vehicles for discussing actual campaign priorities (e.g., toxins, agriculture).
  • Electoral and Patriotic topics were almost entirely devoid of substantive policy discussion, functioning instead as symbolic frames.

C. Temporal Dynamics (ITSA Findings)

• Election Spike: Overall volume spiked on Election Day (Nov 5) but declined significantly afterward.
• Divergent Trends:
  • Patriotic Support declined post-election.
  • Healthy Lifestyle content increased post-election.
  • Health Policy showed a steady, gradual increase independent of the election cycle.
• Conclusion: The discourse shifted from election-centric rallying to lifestyle and policy discussions after the election, but the "slogan" usage remained largely detached from the specific policy agenda.

D. Cross-Platform Variation

The study identified three distinct discourse clusters:

1. Grassroots Partisan Support Space: Dominated by TikTok (high concentration of Topic 4).
2. Informational Sources: Web articles, X, YouTube, and Facebook leaned heavily toward Topic 2 (Policy) and Topic 3 (Electoral).
3. Health-Focused Spaces: Instagram and Reddit showed a stronger emphasis on Topics 1 (Lifestyle) and 2 (Policy).

5. Significance

• Theoretical Implication: The findings challenge the traditional "Agenda-Setting" model where media elites dictate public focus. Instead, they support Agenda-Melding, showing that in fragmented digital environments, the public actively reconstructs campaign slogans into frames that resonate with their identities (e.g., patriotism or wellness) rather than the policy specifics.
• Practical Implication: For political campaigns, this suggests that hashtags may function more as symbolic frames than as vehicles for policy education. A slogan can achieve massive viral reach while failing to communicate the actual legislative or policy goals of the movement.
• Public Health Context: The study highlights how health-related political movements are often co-opted by lifestyle and partisan narratives, potentially obscuring the structural and regulatory changes (e.g., corporate corruption, environmental toxins) that are central to the campaign's stated goals.

In summary, the paper demonstrates that #MAHA functioned less as a unified policy agenda and more as a flexible, platform-dependent symbolic frame, with the vast majority of public discourse diverging significantly from the campaign's official priorities.