Form a few opinions offline before the internet assigns you some.

Walk into a topic with nothing of your own and you walk out carrying whatever was loudest. It never feels like persuasion. You read forty confident takes, the ones you saw most start to sound obvious, and later you defend them as though you got there by yourself.

With the next thing you care about, write down what you think before you search anything. Three sentences is plenty. Then go and read, and see which parts of your own view actually moved and why. Keeping your first draft makes it much harder for anyone to quietly write over it.