Doxxing is where an online dispute stops being online.
[1] The mechanism is not persuasion or provocation — it is handing your location to an indefinite number of strangers and letting whoever is angriest decide what to do with it.
Why the rest of this site does not apply
Every response elsewhere on this site assumes the harm travels through your attention: someone wants a reaction, and declining to give one removes what they came for. Doxxing does not work that way. Once your address is posted, your silence changes nothing about who can read it.
The person who published it may well want a reaction too. That is not the part that matters any more.
What tends to come with it
- Details assembled from many harmless-looking places — an old post, a photo with a street sign, a public register, a relative's account
- Publication framed as accountability rather than as an attack
- Encouragement that stops just short of instruction: naming where you work, wondering aloud who your employer is
- A second wave, as people who were not part of the original dispute join in
- Family members and colleagues drawn in, who never chose any of this
What to do
Capture it before it moves. Screenshot the post, the account, the timestamp and the surrounding thread. Posts get deleted and re-posted elsewhere; the record is what lets anyone else act.
Report it as a privacy and safety matter, not as rudeness. Most platforms treat published personal information as a distinct and more serious category than an insult, and describing it that way gets it to the right queue.
Tell the people it exposes. If your workplace, your building or your family appear in it, they are part of the situation whether or not they use the platform it happened on.
Get help with the exposure itself. Removing information once it has spread is specialist work, and the services on the support page can advise on what is realistic.
If anyone has suggested coming to your home or workplace, contact the police. UK guidance is to use 999 where there is immediate danger and local police otherwise. [2] That is a different conversation from a platform report, and it should happen in parallel rather than afterwards.