After shooting at Trump rally, the number of panicked search terms on the Internet soars: “Civil War 2”

On the day of the assassination of former President Donald Trump and the day after, there was a significant increase in the use of terms such as “Civil War 2” and “American Civil War” on Google.

Google Analytics shows that the search term “American Civil War” hit a 12-month high on Saturday, the day Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The term “Secret Service” also recorded by far the highest increase in interest in the last five years on Saturday.

The terms “long range shooting” and “gun store near me” both saw a significant uptick, reaching new 12-month highs the day after the attack. “How do I move to Canada?” also hit a new 12-month high at the time.

Google Analytics measures overall interest in a particular search term, not each individual use. This means that the top corner of the graph represents the most frequent use of the term in a given time period (100 points) and the bottom corner represents the least frequent use (0 points).

The macabre “How could you miss?” was trending on Twitter within moments of the attack, and “civil war” quickly became the site’s most popular keyword.

The increased interest in these terms underscores the extreme political pressure under which Americans live – a factor that some experts believe contributed to the attack over the weekend.

The Internet played the role of both villain and savior in the assassination attempt on Trump and its perpetrator, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks.

Crooks was identified as an avid consumer of online firearms-related content—he was even killed by the Secret Service while wearing a T-shirt from a popular YouTube channel featuring gun tutorials.

Online radicalization – defined as the adoption of extreme political, social, or religious beliefs or the commission of violent acts after interacting with online content – ​​has been a growing epidemic in the United States for decades.

According to one study, social media played a role in the radicalization of 27 percent of respondents between 2005 and 2010. In the following five years, that number jumped to 73 percent, according to the University of Pennsylvania.

Recent surveys show that almost a third of all Internet users have been confronted with hate speech online. Among online gamers, the figure is as high as 50 percent. YouTube’s algorithm in particular unintentionally promotes extremist content.

Trump himself seems keen to buck these trends after the attempt on his life, telling reporters he had “jettisoned” his original, overly aggressive speech at the Republican National Convention this week and instead presented a new draft that would instead seek to unite and heal the wounded nation.