Beyond Distributive Justice: Hermeneutical Fairness in Ad Delivery

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hermeneutical fairness framework for online ad delivery, addressing interpretative harms and biases beyond traditional distributive justice, and demonstrates its effectiveness through simulations.

Contribution

It models hermeneutical fairness in ad delivery, integrating it into a utility framework to prevent interpretative deprivation and distortion among protected groups.

Findings

Distributive fairness alone can lead to under-delivery for disadvantaged groups.

Hermeneutical constraints reduce interpretative harms with modest utility loss.

Balancing hermeneutical and distributive fairness can prevent concentration of biases.

Abstract

Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce harms arising from ads' content and from how recipients interpret and uptake them. To capture this dimension, we draw on Miranda Fricker's notion of hermeneutical injustice. We model ad delivery as a mechanism that distributes interpretative resources and can fail in two ways: relevant concepts can be withheld through systematic under-exposure, leading to hermeneutical deprivation; and recipients may experience hermeneutical distortions when saturated with low-uptake or skewed framings. Grounded in exploratory correlational patterns from the AIDS Advertising Evaluation surveys (1986-1987), we introduce a group-level hermeneutical fairness constraint and a hermeneutically aware utility cost. We integrate them into a benchmark, utility-driven ad allocation framework that already enforces distributive justice, yielding a distributively fair, hermeneutically aware framework that prevents deprivation and distortion from concentrating within protected groups. Through controlled simulations, we explore trade-offs between economic utility, classical distributive fairness constraints, and hermeneutical cost. The results show that purely utility-based allocation drives under-delivery to the disadvantaged group. When the hermeneutical stakes of withholding ads are high, distributive constraints reduce hermeneutical cost at modest utility loss. Conversely, weighting hermeneutical cost without distributive constraints can yield policies concentrated on the disadvantaged group. These findings motivate expanding fairness analyses of online advertising beyond distributive notions to include epistemic conditions of interpretation and uptake.