For better or worse, the change in Americans’ viewing habits was not permanent. By early last week, the top-ranked posts on CrowdTangle were once again focused primarily on outrage-friendly stories—calls to fire Anthony Fauci, discussions of Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax—mixed in with some heartwarming stories about dogs (both in Ukraine and in Alaska’s Iditarod race).

Interestingly, Russian state media seem to be looking westward again. When justifications of “denazification” flopped as a pretext for invasion, these outlets’ English-language accounts started talking up purported Ukrainian bioweapon labs supported by the Pentagon; Chinese state media began boosting the story too. But the Russians don’t need shadowy troll accounts to whisper about it on Twitter, because—predictably—prominent American culture-war influencers have taken the bait and aired the conspiracy theory on their own platforms. What was the U.S. government’s role in the biolabs, anyway?

Still, the early days of the Russian invasion showed that everyday users have choices. The American culture-war influencers didn’t disappear; users just didn’t pay as much attention to them. It shouldn’t take a shooting war to pull our eyeballs away from the culture war. The normal state of online discourse shouldn’t be an information war of all against all. The brief moment when Americans focused on more important things didn’t last, but it did show that we have some agency here.