TL&DR: When you typically get data from a server, it is sent in bytes. The rationale is that these bytes will need to be 'decoded' by the recipient, who should know how to use the data. You should decode the binary upon arrival to not get 'b' (bytes) but instead a string.
Use case:
import requests
def get_data_from_url(url):
response = requests.get(url_to_visit)
response_data_split_by_line = response.content.decode('utf-8').splitlines()
return response_data_split_by_line
In this example, I decode the content that I received into UTF-8. For my purposes, I then split it by line, so I can loop through each line with a for loop.