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-T