It seems to correlate with reddit usage. Reddit is easily astroturfed to manufacture consensus, and there are plenty of people out there with an interest in turning people against SpaceX. Notably the CCP. If you chart tonnage to orbit by year, you'll see that China briefly overtook America before being absolutely eclipsed by SpaceX. Not much they can do about it either, but stoking domestic opposition to SpaceX is one thing they could do.