How do people respond to political disagreement when they encounter inconsistent political information shared by friends on instant messaging apps? The current study proposes a quadripartite model of responding strategies to political disagreement on instant messaging apps based on two orthogonal dimensions—expressive vs. avoidant and aggressive vs. conservative. Using data from 2022 Taiwan Internet Report (N = 517), the current study examines how promotion focus and prevention focus influence individuals’ adoption of responding strategies based on regulatory focus theory through multinomial logistic regression analysis. The results show that approximately eighty percentage of Taiwanese prefer to adopt conservative-avoidant strategies, followed by conservative-expressive strategies (8.3%), aggressive-expressive strategies (7.7%), and aggressive-avoidant strategies (6.5%). Moreover, our findings reveal that promotion-focused individuals are more likely to adopt aggressive-expressive strategies (e.g., refute others) and aggressive-avoidant strategies (e.g., block, hide message, and unfriending), whereas prevention-focused individuals tend to adopt conservative-expressive strategies (e.g., express supporting opinions) and conservative- avoidant strategies (e.g., ignorance). There are two theoretical contributions. First, the study proposes responding strategies to political disagreement by integrating spiral of silence theory, cognitive dissonance theory, and interpersonal conflict management theory. Second, the application of regulatory focus theory to political communication broadens the research on regulatory focus.