Seznam

Report March 2026

Submitted
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 Conduct 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 2025 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 Lide.cz (formerly Seznam 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/head of content moderation 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.

Key Developments in 2025

  • The 2025 Czech parliamentary elections represented a critical event for democracy and a key systemic risk requiring active mitigation. Seznam.cz participated in the Rapid Response System and received no reports, reflecting the effectiveness of our automated and editorial measures in preventing the spread of electoral disinformation.
  • We partnered with Demagog.cz, a fellow Code signatory, to fact-check political advertisements. Ads rated as false or misleading were stopped from running on our platforms.
  • On election day, our teams identified fake political ads and took them down swiftly, protecting the integrity of the electoral information environment.
  • We presented our achievements and plans in the fight against disinformation at the Code plenary meeting in Brussels in June 2025.
  • In August 2025, we launched a cooperation with three renowned academic institutions — Anglo-American University, the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, and the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University — who provide an additional independent layer of review of our fact-checks to maximise impartiality and objectivity.
  • In November 2025, Seznam Discussions transitioned into Lide.cz, a fully-fledged social platform. We have maintained the same moderation standards, AI-assisted detection, human checks, and fact-checking processes throughout this transition.

We hope that this executive summary provides a clear and comprehensive overview of our actions and achievements in 2025 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.

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Commitment 18
Relevant Signatories commit to minimise the risks of viral propagation of Disinformation by adopting safe design practices as they develop their systems, policies, and features.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 18.1 Measure 18.2 Measure 18.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
If yes, list these implementation measures here
Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?
If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?
Measure 18.1
Relevant Signatories will take measures to mitigate risks of their services fuelling the viral spread of harmful Disinformation, such as: recommender systems designed to improve the prominence of authoritative information and reduce the prominence of Disinformation based on clear and transparent methods and approaches for defining the criteria for authoritative information; other systemic approaches in the design of their products, policies, or processes, such as pre-testing.
QRE 18.1.1 

Seznam Discussions / Lide.cz
Seznam Discussions / Lide.cz minimises the risks of viral propagation of misinformation through the policies described under Commitment 14 and a risk-based internal procedure that helps editors prioritise action against the most harmful content. The following safe design practices are in place:
  1. Comments containing links to misinformation websites are filtered automatically and cannot be posted.
  2. Users can easily report content that violates our policies.
  3. Our systems automatically flag comments containing specific keywords for editorial review.
  4. Fact-checkers label and add context to manipulative or misinformative comments, including on the basis of user reports.
  5. Editors swiftly remove content and ban accounts responsible for severe misinformation, hate speech, or other illegal content.

Seznam Newsfeed and Seznam Medium
Seznam Newsfeed and Seznam Medium minimise the risks of viral propagation of disinformation by enforcing strict policies on what content may appear in each service, as described under Commitment 14.
In Seznam Newsfeed, all submitted articles are automatically checked and pre-categorised by AI — including through clickbait headline detection — with approximately half of all submissions subsequently reviewed by human editors to ensure compliance. Only content meeting quality journalism standards is published automatically, and all such content remains subject to editorial oversight.
Users of Seznam Newsfeed are further empowered through recommender modifiers. By pressing X on any article on our homepage, users can:
  1. Hide the entire news outlet from their feed
  2. Downgrade content they are not interested in
  3. Report an article as misleading or false


QRE 18.1.2
Information on how Seznam Search works can be found here.
Information of Seznam Newsfeed recommender can be found here.


QRE 18.1.3

Seznam Search
Seznam Search prioritises high-quality, authentic sources to deliver the most relevant content and best possible user experience. A risk-based warning framework is in place to reduce user engagement with misinformation websites appearing in search results, through labels and warnings described in detail under Commitment 14.

Seznam Newsfeed
Seznam Newsfeed reduces engagement with disinformation by enforcing strict policies on what content may appear in the service, as described under Commitment 14. All submitted articles are automatically checked and pre-categorised by AI — including through clickbait headline detection — with approximately half subsequently reviewed by human editors to ensure compliance. Only content meeting quality journalism standards is published automatically, and all such content remains subject to editorial oversight.

Seznam Discussions / Lide.cz
Seznam Discussions / Lide.cz reduces engagement with disinformation through the policies described under Commitment 14. Emphasis is placed on debunking disinformation, providing context, and directing users to credible sources of information — carried out by our dedicated fact-checkers as described under Commitment 21.



SLI 18.1.1
Relevant Signatories will provide, through meaningful metrics capable of catering for the performance of their products, policies, processes (including recommender systems), or other systemic approaches as relevant to Measure 18.1 an estimation of the effectiveness of such measures, such as the reduction of the prevalence, views, or impressions of Disinformation and/or the increase in visibility of authoritative information. Insofar as possible, Relevant Signatories will highlight the causal effects of those measures.
  • Data on displayed warnings with educational explanation in Seznam Search, data on the way we promote quality journalism in Seznam Newsfeed and Seznam Medium can be found in the SLI 14.2.1 – SLI 14.2.4
  • Data on fact-checking on Seznam Discussion/Lide.cz can be found in the SLI 21.1.2.