This is a fascinating new study (in part from my alma mater!) pointing to students' awareness of lateral reading as the best strategy for spotting misinformation, but their failure to regularly engage in those strategies as a matter of course. The article suggests a few things related to encouraging and practicing lateral reading strategies (I'll excerpt what is most relevant and useful in my opinion, from the discussion):
"Indeed, our students often indicated preference for lateral reading strategies as the best way to determine trustworthiness without acting on their preferences. This pattern is in keeping with prior work identifying dissociations between knowledge and/or intentions and observed behaviors (Brodsky et al., 2022, 2023). The presence of these dissociations suggests that more than awareness is needed to cultivate effective fact-checking habits. Active and habitual practice is a necessary component in developing most skills (Healy et al., 2014), and this may hold true for lateral reading as well. Greater experience with a behavior may also help narrow the “intention-behavior” gap in novices (Sheeran et al., 2017; Sheeran & Webb, 2016). Therefore, instructors may need to engage students in lateral reading as a routine part of their coursework to strengthen connections between knowledge of appropriate strategies to evaluate information, intentions to apply them, and use of the strategies when engaging with content online."
Suggestions, in addition to "active and habitual practice" of lateral reading strategies, include increasing reading literacy in general (the conjecture there is that students are not going to Wikipedia and other lateral sources to double check information because of limited reading comprehension skills) and also helping students recognize and practice Wikipedia as a valuable resource for lateral reading practices.
The full article is “Preference for a Use of Lateral Reading Strategies” by Lodhi, Brooks, Gravelle, Brodsky, Syed, and Scimeca, out in Journal of Media Literacy Education.
One important issue seems to be that students have a distrust of Wikipedia (often stemming from their professors/teachers), despite changes in its usefulness over the years. Here's an article I love to share to help understand how and why Wikipedia works: “Wikipedia is the last best place on the internet,” by Richard Cooke, Wired, Feb. 17, 2020.
If you look up the most visited websites (obviously difficulty to gage exactly, but this seems like a fair estimate), note the one that is a foundation (nonprofit). (Spoiler: it's wikipedia!)