Seznam

Report March 2025

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 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.

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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
Relevant Signatories will report on the risk mitigation systems, tools, procedures, or features deployed under Measure 18.1 and report on their deployment in each EU Member State.
Seznam Discussions minimises the risks of viral propagation of misinformation by adopting and enforcing its policies described in detail under Commitment 14 and by implementing a risk-based internal procedure for editors to prioritize action against viral disinformation and misinformation content. 

To minimize the risks of viral propagation of misinformation, Seznam Discussions adopted following safe design practices and features:

1)     Comments containing links to misinformation sites are filtered automatically and cannot be posted; 

2)     Users are empowered with feature to easily report such content;

3)     Our systems automatically flag content that includes specific keywords;

4)     Our fact-checkers label and add context to manipulative/misinformative comments also based on user feedback;

5)     Our editors take down and ban severe spread of misinformation, hate speech and other illegal content as quickly as possible.

 

Seznam Newsfeed and Seznam Medium minimise the risks of viral propagation of disinformation by adopting and enforcing policies for what can appear in the service described in detail under Commitment 14.

In Seznam Newsfeed, all articles are checked and pre-categorized by AI, using e.g. clickbait headline detection tool and further checked by human editors. Only quality journalism is published automatically, but with editorial oversight. About half of the articles submitted are consequently checked by human editors to ensure the policy rules are followed and violating content doesn’t appear on Seznam Newsfeed.


In addition, we empower users of Seznam Newsfeed with recommender modifiers. By pressing X on our homepage, users can:
a) hide entire news outlet;
b) express they are not interested in such content and downgrade it;
c) report article as misleading or false.
QRE 18.1.2
Relevant Signatories will publish the main parameters of their recommender systems, both in their report and, once it is operational, on the Transparency Centre.
Information on how Seznam Search works can be found here.Information of Seznam Newsfeed recommender can be found here 
QRE 18.1.3
Relevant Signatories will outline how they design their products, policies, or processes, to reduce the impressions and engagement with Disinformation whether through recommender systems or through other systemic approaches, and/or to increase the visibility of authoritative information.
Seznam Search prioritizes high-quality and authentic information sources to provide users with the most relevant content and best user experience. A risk-based approach is in place to further reduce users’ engagement with misinformation websites that appear in Seznam Search results by displaying labels and warnings described in detail under Commitment 14.


Seznam Newsfeed reduces the engagement with disinformation by adopting and enforcing policies for what can appear in the service described in detail under Commitment 14.

All texts are checked and pre-categorized by technology, using e.g. clickbait headline detection tools and only quality journalism is published automatically, but with editorial oversight. About half of the articles submitted are consequently checked by human editors to ensure the policy rules are followed and violating content doesn’t appear in Seznam Newsfeed.


Seznam Discussions reduces the engagement with disinformation by adopting and enforcing its policies described in detail under Commitment 14. However, we put emphasis on debunking of disinformation, providing context and credible sources of information by our 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 can be found in the SLI 21.1.2.