Don't trust the opinions of strangers online

Online I see lots of comments from strangers I disagree with and are obviously untrue.

If the stranger's comment is defending certain corporate or national interests, I ignore the comment instead of engaging that "individual".

Why? Because there's a good chance that online persona is nothing but a "sock puppet" created by a propaganda group.   An advertisement, masquerading as a person's opinion.

These groups are hired by governments and organizations to propagate their viewpoints. Don't think the US government would do that? Think again. Here is one such contractor's sales pitch for online propaganda work:

In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas