Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services Act or the BAD ADS Act

This bill limits the protection of certain providers of interactive computer services from liability for screening and blocking offensive content on their platforms. Specifically, the bill removes such protection if a provider (1) displays behavioral advertising (e.g., advertising based on the personal traits or previous behavior of a user), or (2) provides data regarding a user to another person knowing that the other person will use that data to create or display behavioral advertising.

A covered provider is any entity that provides an interactive computer service whereby information from other content providers is distributed and which, during the previous year, had more than (1) $1.5 billion in global revenue, and (2) 30 million U.S. users or 300 million worldwide users.