People say the internet felt less like a bot-fueled hate farm this week. Was it real?

This story originally appeared on Them.

Did this past week on social media seem less anger-inducing? More fun? Maybe for some of you, it felt downright pastoral, like a Norman Rockwell painting.

People across the internet reported breathing easier online this week, claiming that they experienced far fewer negative, polarizing, and rage-baiting interactions on social media, especially from accounts that are considered “bots” — accounts designed to look like real users that lurk in comment sections and threads across the internet, inflating engagement and often sowing discord.

At least one possible explanation came from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who claimed on Monday that a series of military strikes this past weekend against data centers of Yandex, considered Russia’s equivalent of Google, had led to a swift downturn in bot activity online.

“When our strikes reached Yandex’s data centers, it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” Zelenskyy said, while speaking at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. He added that there had been “less hate, less division and fewer provocations” online due to decreased bot activity.

Following Zelenskyy’s claim, several prominent people online seemed to corroborate that, however temporarily, their comment sections had been much less of a shitshow.

“No one calling me a N-word F-slur under this post, I guess the bots really are gone,” New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé wrote on social media on Tuesday. The post was a quote-post of a photo in which he jokingly claimed that he had undergone “twink death” since becoming an elected official.

Other accounts seemed to revel in the fact that, at least temporarily, social media sites such as X, which have only seem to have become more polarized in recent years, seemed somewhat pleasant.

Some people on social media highlighted that the replies to the White House’s X account seemed much less saturated with pro-Trump sycophancy, as well.

Even Elon Musk’s engagement on his own platform seemed to shrivel post-strike, according to a report in tech news website Futurism. Per Futurism, Musk garnered an average of 17,000 to 81,000 likes per post on X throughout October, but in the two days leading up to the article’s October 13 publication date, most had somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000.

It is both undeniable, and well-documented, that the past decade has seen a marked campaign from Russian influence operations to sow pro-Russia and anti-Western sentiment in the United States, as well as a crusade to foment animosity. Butdespite anecdotal and at least some quantitative evidence, several organizations have since come out against Zelenskyy’s coloring of the strike, instead pointing out that the “bots” taken out during the Yandex strikes were not misinformation bots, but were “web crawlers” which scan the internet to index web sites, per Mother Jones.

Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University told Mother Jones that the word “bot” can have multiple meanings, which can be behind some of the confusion.

“It is used as shorthand for both web crawlers and online trolls,” DiResta told Jones. “Web crawlers plummeting makes sense, but online trolls usually have more resilient infrastructure.”

Researchers from the group dTeam, which tracks Russian influence operations, told the BBC that there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform.”

@Antibot4navalny, a group of researchers combatting Russian disinformation, also posted on X on Tuesday that they hadn’t seen a major difference in activity from disinformation-oriented bots.

“We see no ‘dramatic drop’ in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” the group wrote on X.

Another group that monitors Russian disinformation, Vatnik Soup, also told Mother Jones that there is “no solid evidence” of a drop in activity from Russian bot farms.

“This doesn’t mean the strikes haven’t had an effect, but no one has demonstrated it with solid data so far,” the account wrote in a post reported by Mother Jones. (The account has since been suspended by X.) “Many users have reported seeing fewer pro-Kremlin posts and replies since the strikes, and some automated pro-Russian and pro-MAGA accounts have reportedly gone silent. But this could simply be a coincidence.”

The fact that everyone seemed to be effervescent about the Great Bot Removal makes sense, according to DiResta.

“The ‘Russian bot takedown’ story is satisfying because people are tired of suspected manipulation,” DiResta told Jones. “And the idea that a Ukrainian strike silenced fake accounts is a compelling story of victory against a common enemy. It also supports the comforting belief that your political enemies aren’t even real.”

In fact, in a statement to the BBC, even Zelenskyy’s office seemed to soften some of the president’s comments, saying that the Ukrainian leader was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” rather than any discernable downturn in bot baiting.

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