A Year Inside Online Sperm Donation: What One Study Observed
Building trust in a suspicious network: findings from a one-year digital ethnography of five online sperm donation platforms. (Smith, 2026)
Smith, L., Krotoski, A., Carless, D., Eldred, L., Frith, L., Jones, G., Pacey, A. A., Palmer, T., Taylor-Phillips, F., & Turner-Moore, R. (2026). Building trust in a suspicious network: findings from a one-year digital ethnography of five online sperm donation platforms. Human Fertility, 29(1), 2707214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647273.2026.2707214
Geographic Region: Majority English-speaking countries (including the UK and USA)
Research Question: What rules and behaviors are expected and normalized within online sperm donation (OSD) platforms? How do platform moderators and users build online identities and reputations on OSD platforms? How do site users start, maintain, and end their online relationships?
Design: A digital ethnography design used in Phase 2 of The Online Sperm Donation Project. One researcher joined five OSD platforms for one year, from September 2023 to November 2024. The first two months involved intensive immersion, followed by approximately 1.5 hours per week of observation and participation per site for the remaining ten months. Five types of data were collected: (1) platform texts and policies from each site; (2) synchronous and asynchronous interviews with platform owners; (3) post-interview reflections; (4) in-depth fieldnotes compiled in immersion journals for each site; and (5) private asynchronous conversations with platform users.
Sample: Five OSD platforms participated (given pseudonyms) and included websites, geolocation apps, and social media platforms, some operating in hybrid on/offline formats. They ranged in size from fewer than 2,000 users to more than 60,000, collectively hosting over 150,000 user profiles (not accounting for duplicates). All were free to use, though one offered paid features. Platforms were initially selected from an environmental scan to represent the diversity of available OSD types; five ultimately agreed to participate, and two were added opportunistically during the study. Eight platform owner interviews were conducted. Forty private conversations were completed with platform users. Participants included recipients, donors, platform owners, and moderators across a range of gender identities and family structures, including LGBTQ+ users.
Key Findings
Users constructed idealized profiles aligned with norms of “good” donorship or parenting, showcasing health, stability, hobbies, and education while omitting traits perceived as undesirable (e.g., mental health challenges, substance use, neurodiversity, unstable employment, criminal backgrounds). The authors described these omissions as identity reconstruction, rather than active deception.
Donors tended to share their virility (e.g., watermarked photos of pregnancy tests or donor-conceived children), while recipients tended to emphasize their deservingness (e.g., framing OSD as a “last resort” or demonstrating the stability and resources needed to parent).
Vetting criteria often functioned as class-based and eugenicist screening, though the paper does not use these terms. Recipients screened donors partly on the basis of criminal background, with one recipient expressing concern that a child would think they came from “bad genes”. Donors screened recipients using indicators of economic stability (home ownership, car ownership, employment type, spelling quality). Platforms explicitly provided “good” and “bad” examples of recipient self-presentation that differed along lines of class and educational attainment.
Donor identity characteristics associated with risk (e.g., offering only "natural insemination," offering to ship sperm, poor written English) were circulated as heuristics for spotting bad actors. The authors note that actual harm-doers are not reliably identifiable through visible characteristics.
Verification practices were widespread but inconsistently applied. Rating and review features were available on some platforms but largely underutilized, partly because of social costs. Most donor profiles had not been reviewed, and where reviews existed, they were often outdated.
Vouching behaviors (i.e., experienced when donors publicly endorsed other donors) created “inner circles” of visible, high-volume donors. Some donors viewed this as competitive gatekeeping that benefited a small group.
Platforms sometimes disclaimed responsibility for user safety, placing the burden of protection on individuals. Women recipients were positioned as most at risk and most responsible for vetting donors. Some platforms encouraged lateral (user-to-user) surveillance. “Digilantism” (i.e., do-it-yourself justice) emerged when users doubted platforms’ ability to manage harm. This included recipients acting as amateur detectives, publicly naming alleged scammers, and circulating risk lists.
Mistrust was pervasive and shaped by past experiences, cautionary stories circulating online, and platform guidance that encouraged users to be vigilant. Users generally expected to encounter bad actors eventually.
Gamification features like swipe technology influenced selection in ways that sometimes encouraged low-stakes matching and contributed to communication difficulties (e.g., accidental ghosting due to volume). Platform blocking tools, designed as safety features, also facilitated ghosting, which recipients and donors reported produced emotional.
Recipients sometimes chose not to report uncomfortable or harassing donor behavior to platforms, viewing it as insufficiently serious or believing the donor would not be removed.
Experienced donors were typically positioned as “knowers,” often aligning themselves with doctors or educators and providing health-related information to recipients. Donors rarely asked for advice publicly; recipients were constructed as transient knowledge-seekers.
Debates about "natural insemination" (NI; unprotected penile-vaginal intercourse) frequently devolved into "evidence wars" in which some donors deployed pseudoscientific arguments — including claims that assisted reproduction carries higher rates of birth defects — and discourses of male sexuality and "natural" conception to advocate for NI as more legitimate. When recipients challenged donors' positions on NI, they were sometimes accused of misandry or lacking knowledge.
Institutional mistrust of regulated sperm banks and fertility clinics was actively promoted by some platforms, which positioned OSD as more ethical and transparent. This framing was sometimes inverted: corporate profit was framed as exploitative, while individual donor compensation (money, travel, sex) was normalized.
Limitations: Because not all users may have been aware of the researcher's presence despite posted notices, the degree to which observed behavior reflects typical practice or performance for a known observer is uncertain. The lead researcher's positionality is addressed in supplementary material rather than the main text, and its effect on data collection and analysis is not fully examined. The study does not examine how race shapes platform norms, vetting criteria, or access patterns, despite the racial valence of the class-based screening behaviors documented.
Applications: The authors say platforms should stop putting the burden of safety on individual users, especially women, and instead work with recipients and LGBTQ+ users to build better tools, citing features like the ability to leave feedback when blocking someone. They want recipients to have more say in how platforms are run, since donors currently dominate. They also think people should be encouraged to stay active on platforms even after they've found a donor, so knowledge and support aren't concentrated among a small group of experienced donors. Finally, they want platforms to point users toward reliable, expert-produced information instead of the mix of accurate and misleading content that currently circulates.
Funding Source: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), UK; grant number ES/W001381/1.
Lead Author: Lauren Smith is a qualitative health researcher at Leeds Beckett University whose work focuses on digital health, reproductive experiences, and digital ethnography methods, with a particular interest in online spaces for health and social connection. No personal connection to donor conception was disclosed.
Regulatory Context: This study examined OSD platforms operating outside formal regulatory frameworks in majority English-speaking countries.
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