In python, what does x = y == "true" do?

I'm going through my companies code, and there's instances where someone is assigning some variable x to another variable y, followed by == "true".

I'm not following and google is failing me. Do I set x to equal y if y equals "true"? There's no conditional statements (if) and I've never encountered this before. I don't even know how to search for this.

If it was just x = y = z, I would assume that both x and y are being set to the value of z. but a == outside of a conditional is throwing me