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 21
Relevant Signatories commit to strengthen their efforts to better equip users to identify Disinformation. In particular, in order to enable users to navigate services in an informed way, Relevant Signatories commit to facilitate, across all Member States languages in which their services are provided, user access to tools for assessing the factual accuracy of sources through fact-checks from fact-checking organisations that have flagged potential Disinformation, as well as warning labels from other authoritative sources.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 21.1
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 21.1
Relevant Signatories will further develop and apply policies, features, or programs across Member States and EU languages to help users benefit from the context and insights provided by independent fact-checkers or authoritative sources, for instance by means of labels, such as labels indicating fact-checker ratings, notices to users who try to share or previously shared the rated content, information panels, or by acting upon content notified by fact-checkers that violate their policies.
QRE 21.1.1 

Seznam.cz is committed to helping users identify and navigate disinformation. Across our services, we facilitate access to fact-checkers and fact-checking organisations, as detailed under Commitment 14.
Our partnerships with impartial civic and academic institutions underpin the fair and objective rating of media outlets we aggregate, rank, and display across our services.
  • The Foundation for Independent Journalism (NFNZ) provides us with their Media Rating — a rating system grounded in extensive research conducted by experts at Charles University — which we use to exclude news sources that fail to meet the required standards. The NFNZ Media Rating methodology is available here.
  • In partnership with NFNZ and other independent evaluators — including Konšpirátori.sk and Nelež — we identify and flag misinformation websites, and offer users the option to blacklist such sites directly within our services. We draw on the following sitelists:
  • Since August 2025, our fact-checking is subject to an additional independent review provided by three academic institutions — Anglo-American University, the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, and the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University — further strengthening the impartiality and objectivity of our assessments.
  • During the 2025 Czech parliamentary elections, we participated in the Rapid Response System as part of our commitment to protecting the integrity of the democratic process. We received no reports, reflecting the effectiveness of our automated and editorial safeguards.
  • We closely monitor emerging misinformation narratives to counter them proactively across Seznam Discussions and other services.
SLI 21.1.1
Relevant Signatories will report through meaningful metrics on actions taken under Measure 21.1, at the Member State level. At the minimum, the metrics will include: total impressions of fact-checks; ratio of impressions of fact-checks to original impressions of the fact-checked content–or if these are not pertinent to the implementation of fact-checking on their services, other equally pertinent metrics and an explanation of why those are more adequate.
Seznam Newsfeed
Use of independent media ratings
Number of websites listed by independent rating bodies
General news websites with NFNZ rating allowed in Seznam Newsfeed 41
Disinformation and conspiratorial websites not allowed in Seznam Newsfeed (cross-section of NFNZ + Konspiratori.sk + Atlas konspiraci) 22
Junk news websites rated by NFNZ not allowed in Seznam Newsfeed 1176
SLI 21.1.2
When cooperating with independent fact-checkers to label content on their services, Relevant Signatories will report on actions taken at the Member State level and their impact, via metrics, of: number of articles published by independent fact-checkers; number of labels applied to content, such as on the basis of such articles; meaningful metrics on the impact of actions taken under Measure 21.1.1 such as the impact of said measures on user interactions with, or user re-shares of, content fact-checked as false or misleading.
Seznam Discussions
  • Our editors and fact-checkers operate according to comprehensive internal guidelines. Fact-checkers add context to manipulative or misinformative comments drawing on independent third-party sources, including EUvsDisinfo, AFP, and other trusted international and national outlets.
  • We have compiled more than 350 regularly updated fact-checks on various issues and made them public.
  • Since August 2025, our fact-checking is subject to an additional independent review provided by three academic institutions — Anglo-American University, the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, and the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University — further strengthening the impartiality and objectivity of our assessments.
Nr of articles published by independent fact-checkers Nr of labels applied to content such as on the basis of such articles
Czech Republic 350 25294