Seznam.cz is a leading Czech internet company that provides various online services, such as search, news, email, maps, and e-commerce. Seznam.cz is proud to be a signatory of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation and to contribute to its mission of enhancing transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness of online platforms and information. We believe that our actions and achievements in 2024 demonstrate our commitment and our progress in this regard.
We are aware that the fight against disinformation and misinformation is an ongoing and evolving challenge that requires constant vigilance, adaptation, and cooperation. We are determined to continue our efforts and cooperation with other signatories, stakeholders, and authorities to uphold the Code’s principles and objectives.
This report covers the following aspects of our approach to misinformation and disinformation on our services: Seznam Search, Seznam Newsfeed, and Discussions.

Our commitment to fight falsehoods
- We take the issue of disinformation and misinformation very seriously. Since 2023, we have a fulltime role of anti-disinformation officer who coordinates all projects across services that we aim to keep trustworthy, clean of falsehoods and manipulations.

- We have strict policies tackling impermissible manipulative behaviours and practices on our services, including the policies countering manipulative practices for AI. Our long-term goal is to promote transparency and accountability to our users and partners regarding these policies and actions.

- We combine human editors and technologies to implement and enforce these policies, elevate authoritative information and high-quality content, promote good journalism and moderate discussions.

- We educate users of our services by explanatory labels, fact-checks, links to credible sources, promotion of quality journalism and prioritization of quality content in our ranking systems. 

- We also provide features to easily report problematic content and personalize user experience, thus empowering them to get trustworthy information and act upon them.

- We develop projects that increase media literacy and critical thinking skills among people of all ages. 

Our achievements and improvements
- We have continued to improve our detection of AI-generated content, clickbait articles, and other forms of misleading or harmful content, and we have increased our human oversight and moderation.
- We continuously trained our AI system to detect misinformation narratives in comments and suggest relevant fact-checks to editors.

- We have measured the impact of our fact-checking, proving that it increases perceived trustworthiness and objectivity among the public, as well as it decreases stress and negative emotions. 

- We have made all our fact-checks public for anyone to double-check it or use it.

- We have continued to blacklist and demote misinformative and poor-quality sources on our services, while using independent external ratings. Our steadfast partnership with impartial civic and academic institutions ensures a fair and objective rating of the media outlets we aggregate, rank, and display within our services and sites.

- We have continued to flag misinformation websites and display warnings in Seznam Search.

- On our blogging service, Seznam Medium, we have continued to keep the same editorial standards and commitments to prevent the spread of misinformation.

Commitment to the Code and its Signatories
- We have played an active role in different Subgroups of the Code, particularly on Monitoring & Reporting and AI. We are open to share our data, feedback, and best practices with other Signatories and the European Commission, to improve the implementation and evaluation of the Code.
- We want to keep sharing our learnings and insights with other Signatories, as well as with the public and the media. We believe that transparency and dialogue are essential for building trust and credibility in the online space.

We hope that this executive summary provides a clear and comprehensive overview of our actions and achievements in 2024 to fight against disinformation and misinformation on our services. We are proud of our progress, and we are determined to continue our efforts and cooperation with other signatories, stakeholders, and authorities to uphold the Code’s principles and objectives.