Quoteinvestigator says this expression has been evolving for three hundred years.

In 1787 “falsehood” was reaching “every corner of the earth”. In 1820 a colorful version was circulating with lies flying from “Maine to Georgia” while truth was “pulling her boots on”. By 1834 “error” was running “half over the world” while truth was “putting on his boots”. In 1924 a lie was circling the globe while a truth was “lacing its shoes on”.

You can read the citations for yourself on the site. I’m more excited by a recent study that shows this expression is true.

False news spreads faster than true stories, and it’s because of humans, not bots, according to a new study published today in Science. axios

I’m still angry at Russian meddling in our elections, and fake news continues to be a threat. Did the Russians change anyone’s vote? Who can tell? You and I look at loads of information – even if I told you a particular story you viewed was false-news-from-Russia (or, for that matter, from a fellow citizen) I doubt you could say that particular item tipped you over the edge.

The reason fake news works is because we’re human. “Avoid temptation to shift the blame elsewhere… Even if we solve bots and the foreign interference problem, it wouldn’t solve the problem of online misinformation.”

Researchers studied more than 4.5 million tweets between 2006 and 2017. They used six fact-checking sites, including Politifact and Snopes, to determine if an item was true.

They found false stories — especially political ones — traveled faster, farther and deeper into the network than the true kind. (True stories took six times as long as false ones to reach 1500 people.) And, false stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.

We humans are programmed for this. I’m reminded of the notion that, if our ancestors believed there was a lion rather than wind behind rustling grass, they lived to have offspring who led to us. Our brains find it safer to believe anything that confirms our fears, and so we share the item. The study says novelty also grabs us, and something we never heard before is more likely to be false (at least, on Twitter) but we share it.

If you’ve tut-tutted over claims about male and female bell peppers, or Mars will appear the size of the full moon tomorrow night, or rumors of gang initiations that kill innocent people, or pizzagate – well, it’s just human nature. It takes effort to engage all that lovely pre-frontal cortex, but it’s worth it.