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 22
Relevant Signatories commit to provide users with tools to help them make more informed decisions when they encounter online information that may be false or misleading, and to facilitate user access to tools and information to assess the trustworthiness of information sources, such as indicators of trustworthiness for informed online navigation, particularly relating to societal issues or debates of general interest.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 22.1 Measure 22.2
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 22.1
Relevant Signatories will make it possible for users of their services to access indicators of trustworthiness (such as trust marks focused on the integrity of the source and the methodology behind such indicators) developed by independent third-parties, in collaboration with the news media, including associations of journalists and media freedom organisations, as well as fact-checkers and other relevant entities, that can support users in making informed choices.
QRE 22.1.1

Seznam Search
counters misinformation by promoting high-quality, authentic content and demoting low-quality content through its ranking system. For misinformation websites appearing in search results, we apply a risk-based warning framework grounded in independent sources:
  • Category 1 — Blocked illegal content (based on EU Guidelines): The strictest intervention. Users are shown a hard red warning and are not permitted to click through to the target website, even if it appears in search results.
  • Category 2 — Flagged misinformation (based on independent ratings by NFNZ, Konspiratori.sk, and the Atlas of Conspiracies): A red warning alerts users before they visit a known misinformation website, with an optional explanatory box detailing why the site has been flagged.
  • Videos from domains flagged under either category are not displayed in search results.
  • Links to misinformation websites appear in our search results only rarely. However, data indicates that users actively seeking such content are highly determined — approximately 90% dismiss the Category 2 warning and proceed to the site regardless.

Seznam Discussions
  • Our AI helps editors detect misinformation narrative in comments. Then, it suggests fact-checking by labelling misinformative comments and adding context boxes. 
  • 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.
SLI 22.1.1
Relevant Signatories will report on Member State level percentage of users that have enabled the trustworthiness indicator.
See data under Commitments 14 and 21.