Absolutely.

Try not to engage negatively with people in all cases. You never know who's unbalanced, who has a weapon, or who has the urge to try and ruin your life.

I now only use throwaways on reddit that I regularly purge and I don't engage negatively with people at all on social media that has my actual identity on it.

Paranoid?

No. Years ago I got into a fb argument with some idiots from a white supremacist organization in my country. Didn't think much of it, had been doing a lot of that thanks to a certain presidential candidate in another country emboldening that type of bullshit. So one of these morons looked at my fb profile, saw my work info, looked up the company site, and found the contact info for the CTO of the company at the head office.

So what, they said I called them bad words for being bad people?

No. The used a fucking fb messenger convo faking app to make it look like I was threatening them and their family with violence. It was a fucking nightmare. I threw my phone across the desk immediately so they could check my messenger, saw I hadn't been in contact with whoever it was. The lawyers got involved. As I was adamant I had sent no such messages the lawyers decided to get the police involved. The police contacted this fucking asshole and he was scared enough that he admitted to faking it to try and get me fired. Lawyers asked if I wanted to sue him for defamation, but since he's clearly unhinged and knows me real name I just wanted it to stop and get back to work.