Fury or Fright? Politically Motivated Doxing and Its Effects on Doxees’ Civic Engagement

Doxing, the malicious exposure of personal information online to threaten or intimidate individuals, is an escalating global threat. A particularly consequential form is politically motivated doxing (PMD), where perpetrators— known as doxers—target individuals for their viewpoints and beliefs, shaping sociopolitical discourse in the process. Despite PMD’s profound impact, research on the perspective of victims (referred to as doxees) remains scarce. Drawing on affective events theory, this study argues that doxees perceive PMD as a breach of their fundamental civil rights. We theorize that PMD triggers an affective duality—fear and anger—in doxees, which drives divergent behavioral shifts in their civic engagement across online and offline domains. Additionally, we examine how doxees’ strength of conviction regarding the PMD issue moderates their affective reaction, revealing distinct responses among individuals with moderate versus extreme views. Using a monostrand mixed-methods approach with a dominant quantitative and a complementary qualitative component, we conduct a personalized, immersive online vignette study in the context of U.S. school boards to empirically test our model. Our findings contribute to the IS literature by: (1) advancing theoretical and empirical understanding of doxees’ perceptions of PMD, (2) linking these perceptions to their affective and behavioral responses, and (3) demonstrating that PMD has a particularly suppressive effect on civic engagement among doxees with less firmly held convictions, highlighting PMD as a mechanism through which malicious actors exacerbate sociopolitical polarization. Our work offers timely implications for policymakers and online platforms.