I doubt anyone is alleging Elon Musk has control over Google's search. Google Trends suggests the same kind of interest change at exactly the same point in mid-July: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2024-01-01%202...

Interesting observation. From my experience, any abrupt shift in a metric is normally due to external factors rather than internal ones. Something that academics seem to miss entirely.

Indeed. As others have noted, that would be when the attempted assassination of Trump was, shortly followed by Elon endorsing him and then forming his PAC [1]. I'd expect such activities to raise interest in his activities and statements, so this entire thing seems to be a staggering miss at asking very basic questions before leaping to conclusions.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_PAC

Yeah like an assassination attempt.

Twitter algorithm changes can presumably play some role in driving what people Google for.

Presumably they can lead to assassination attempts, too. But it becomes hard to prove.

This could be the result of the news feed change at X and Musk's endorsement of Trump...

For the unaware or the forgetful, July 13, 2024 was the day someone tried to assassinate Trump.[1]

I am not surprised that Trump and Republicans immediately garnered more attention as a consequence, rightfully or otherwise.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Don...

The obvious answer is that Trumps assassination attempt were due to the twitter algorithm change that happened that day!!!