Legal

This document is available in English. The English version is the binding one.

Terms of Service

Last updated: 18 October 2026

TheFakto is a social network where every account belongs to a real person who passed an identity check. These terms are the contract between you and us. They are written to be read, not to be skipped. Together with the Rules, the Privacy Policy and the Cookies page they cover everything about using the service.

1. Who we are and how to reach us

TheFakto is operated by Jan Štegner, a sole trader registered in the Trade Licensing Register of the Czech Republic, doing business in the Czech Republic. In these terms we are called the operator, we or us. You are the user or you.

Contact e mail for everything, including reports, appeals, data protection requests and legal notices: honzastegner19@gmail.com. Mail from us arrives from hello@thefakto.com, so add that address to your contacts.

That same e mail address is our single point of contact for users and for authorities under Articles 11 and 12 of the EU Digital Services Act, and our contact point for removal orders under Regulation (EU) 2021/784 on terrorist content online. You can write to it in English or Czech. A human reads it and answers it, and you are never forced through a bot to reach us. Inside the app you can also use the report and support forms, so you can choose how you contact us.

We are one person, so please be patient and be precise. If your message is about content, include the link.

2. What TheFakto is, and that it is a closed beta

TheFakto lets you publish posts with text, photos and videos, publish Stories, publish short videos called Wheels, comment, like and share, send direct messages and voice messages, make video calls, and run or join Groups and Pages. A marketplace called Shop and an Events feature are planned and are not part of the service yet.

Right now TheFakto is in closed beta. Entry is by invitation, there is a waiting list, and the number of new identity checks we can pay for each month is limited, currently 500 free checks a month. Being on the waiting list does not guarantee you a place, and we cannot promise when your turn comes.

In a closed beta things break, features change and features disappear. We may change, limit or switch off any part of the service while we are in beta. We will not do that to paid features without telling you first and handling your money fairly, as described in sections 9 to 11.

3. Who can join

• You must be 18 or older. There is no version of TheFakto for minors.
• You must pass identity verification with your own valid identity document.
• One person, one account. Your name on TheFakto must be the name on your identity document. Your username can be anything that follows the Rules.
• You must not be barred from using the service by a previous closure of your account.

By creating an account you confirm all of the above is true. Giving us false information is a breach of these terms.

4. Identity verification

Verification is done by Didit, a specialist identity verification provider acting for us. You scan your identity document and take a live selfie, and Didit compares the two and checks the document.

We never store your document images or your selfie. What reaches TheFakto is only three things: whether you passed, your year of birth, and the country that issued your document. Details, including what Didit itself keeps and on what legal basis, are in the Privacy Policy.

If the check says you are under 18, we do not create an account and we delete your data, keeping only an irreversible fingerprint of the document so that the same document cannot be used again before you are 18.

Verification can fail for boring reasons: bad light, a damaged document, an unsupported document type. You can try again. We can also ask you to verify again later if we have reason to believe an account is not held by the person it was verified for.

Verification proves that a real, adult person is behind an account. It does not mean we vouch for anything that person says or sells.

5. Your account and your security

Keep your password to yourself and use a different one than you use elsewhere. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us immediately if you think somebody else has got into it.

Selling, renting, lending or transferring an account is not allowed, and neither is using an account that was verified by somebody else. An account is tied to one verified identity, and that is not transferable.

6. Rules, moderation and what we do about content

The Rules are part of these terms. They list in plain language what is not allowed, what happens when you break a rule, and where there is a narrow exception. Read them, because enforcement follows them.

The core principle: the person who uploads is responsible for what they upload. You tick a box before publishing to confirm the content is yours or that you have the right to publish it, and that it follows the Rules.

How moderation works here, so that there are no surprises:

• Automatic checks on upload. Images and text go through AI models running on Cloudflare. Images are described and screened, text is screened for unsafe content. Clear breaches are refused immediately. Content flagged as severe is hidden until a human reviews it.
• Reports. Anyone can report any content. Two independent reports marking the same content as severe hide it automatically pending review.
• Human decisions. Automatic checks are a filter. A human makes the final call whenever you ask for one, and always before an account is closed.
• A reason, every time. If we remove your content, hide it, make it harder to find, age restrict it, limit your account, or suspend or close it, you get a notice, at the latest when the restriction starts. That includes content hidden automatically after reports. The notice says what we did, how wide and how long it applies, the facts we relied on, whether a report or an automatic check triggered it, whether a machine or a human decided, the exact rule or the law we relied on, and how to challenge it. This is the statement of reasons required by Article 17 of the Digital Services Act, and the Rules list the elements point by point.
• Appeals. A human reviews appeals, not the automatic check that made the first call. We aim to answer within seven days and we tell you when a case needs longer. If we were wrong, the content comes back and the strike is cancelled.

We may remove content, limit an account, suspend it or close it when the Rules or these terms are broken, when the law requires it, or when a valid order from a court or competent authority tells us to. A removal order for terrorist content under Regulation (EU) 2021/784 is executed within one hour, and we keep the removed material for six months as that regulation requires.

We act on what we know. As a hosting provider we are not liable for content we do not know about, and no law obliges us to monitor everything you write, which is why reports matter. Checking uploads and acting on reports does not make us the author of your content.

We apply restrictions in a way that is meant to be diligent, objective and proportionate, and with regard to your freedom of expression. If we get that balance wrong in your case, appeal and say so.

7. Your content and the licence you give us

What you post stays yours. You do not give us ownership of anything.

You do give us a licence to host your content and show it inside TheFakto, because otherwise the service cannot work. That licence is worldwide, free of charge, non exclusive, and limited to operating and promoting the service: storing your content, converting it to other formats and sizes so it plays on different devices, making thumbnails and previews, showing it to the people you chose to show it to, and showing it inside TheFakto features such as feeds, Groups, Pages and search.

The licence lasts while your content is on TheFakto. Delete a post and the licence for it ends. We may keep backup copies for a short time while they age out, and we may keep a copy of content that was removed for breaking the Rules for as long as we need it to answer an appeal or a question from an authority.

What we will not do with your content: sell it, licence it to advertisers, or use it to build advertising profiles of you. We run no advertising network.

You are responsible for having the rights to everything you upload, including music, clips, photos and text made by other people. Editing something in another app does not transfer that responsibility to the app.

8. Music and sound

Sound on TheFakto comes from FaktoBeats, our own licensed library, or from your own recordings, or from sounds another user uploaded and released for reuse. You may use FaktoBeats tracks in content you publish on TheFakto. You may not download them and use them elsewhere, and you may not resell them.

Uploading somebody else's music as a sound is not allowed, however short the clip is.

9. Paid features, prices and payment

Most of TheFakto is free. These features are paid:

• Skip the verification queue: 9.99 US dollars, one off. It moves you up the queue. It does not change the outcome of the check.
• Gold Premium: 12.99 US dollars a month.
• Verified Business Page: 4.99 US dollars a month.

Payments are handled by Stripe. You enter your card details on Stripe's own payment page. Card numbers never reach TheFakto. Stripe tells us whether the payment succeeded and what you bought. Stripe's own terms and privacy notice apply to the payment itself.

The total you will be charged, including any tax that applies, is shown before you confirm. Prices are in US dollars, so your bank may add a conversion fee that we do not control and do not receive.

Subscriptions renew automatically every month until you cancel them. You can cancel at any time in the Stripe customer portal, which you reach from your TheFakto settings. Cancelling stops the next payment. The month you already paid for runs to its end, and you keep the feature until then.

If a payment fails, Stripe may retry it. If it keeps failing, the paid feature switches off and your account continues as a free account.

If we raise the price of a subscription, we tell you at least 30 days before it applies, and you can cancel before then.

Sanctions. We cannot provide paid features to persons or organisations on the sanctions lists of the European Union, the United States or the United Nations, or to anyone in a country or region under comprehensive sanctions. By buying a paid feature you confirm that you are not such a person or organisation. If we find out that you are, we may refuse the payment, switch off the paid feature and deal with any money as the law requires.

10. Your 14 day right of withdrawal

If you are a consumer in the EU, you have 14 days from buying a digital service to withdraw from the purchase, without giving a reason. Here is how that works for each of our paid features.

Skip the verification queue. This is delivered immediately, so before you pay we ask you to confirm two things: that you want us to start right away, and that you understand you lose the right of withdrawal once the service has been fully delivered. If you do not confirm that, we do not move you up the queue until the 14 days have passed. Separately from the withdrawal right, we give you a full refund if your verification does not pass, whenever that happens.

Gold Premium and verified Business Page. You can withdraw within 14 days of subscribing even if you started using the feature straight away. If you asked us to start immediately, we refund what you paid minus a proportionate amount for the days you actually had the feature. If you did not ask us to start immediately, you get the full amount back.

How to withdraw. Write to honzastegner19@gmail.com within the 14 days and say you are withdrawing. One sentence is enough, and you do not need a form. We refund using the same payment method you paid with, within 14 days of receiving your message.

The right of withdrawal is a consumer right. If you buy on behalf of a business, it does not apply to your purchase, although you can of course still cancel a subscription at any time.

11. Free features, and what we do not promise

TheFakto is new, small and changing. We work hard to keep it up, fast and safe, but we cannot promise that it will always be available, complete, free of errors or free of data loss, and we do not promise any particular reach, number of views or number of followers.

Keep your own copies of content that matters to you. Treat TheFakto as a place you publish, not as your only archive.

We are responsible for damage we cause by breaking these terms. We are not responsible for what other users publish, for what you do with the service, or for losses that we could not reasonably foresee, such as lost profit or lost business opportunities. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for intentional harm or gross negligence, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit. If you are a consumer, your mandatory legal rights come first and are not cut down by anything written here.

12. If we think you are under 18

TheFakto is 18+ and verification is how we keep it that way. If the check says you are under 18, no account is created. If we later have a reasonable suspicion that an account holder is under 18, for example because the account was verified with somebody else's document, we suspend the account, ask for a fresh verification, and close it if the suspicion is confirmed. Content published by that account comes down.

Anyone can report a suspected minor through the report button or by writing to us. We would rather check ten reports than leave one child on an adult network.

13. If a user dies

If we receive credible notice that a user has died, together with something that supports it such as a death certificate or an official record, we will do one of two things at the request of a close relative or the person handling the estate: memorialise the account, which freezes it so that nobody can log in or change anything while the profile stays visible to the people who could already see it, or close it and delete the content.

We do not hand over the contents of somebody's account, their messages or their password to relatives. Messages involve other living people who wrote them in private, and an account is tied to one verified identity that cannot be transferred. If a court or an authority orders otherwise, we follow the order. Write to honzastegner19@gmail.com and we will explain what we need.

14. Ending it

You. You can delete your account at any time in your settings. Here is what actually happens. Your profile, posts, Stories, Wheels, comments and uploaded files stop being visible immediately. Your files are deleted from our storage and your records from our database within 30 days. Messages you sent stay visible to the people you sent them to, because they are their conversations too, and they show as coming from a deleted account. Where the law makes us keep something, such as payment records for tax, we keep only that, and only for as long as the law says. The full picture, with the retention periods, is in the Privacy Policy.

If you had a subscription, cancel it in the Stripe portal as well, so no further payment is taken.

Deleting an account does not wipe the record that a verification happened, because otherwise a person removed for serious abuse could simply start again. We keep the minimum needed for that, and only that.

Us. We can suspend or close an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks these terms or the Rules, that was created to get around a previous closure, or where we are legally required to act. We tell you why, and you can appeal. For the most serious breaches listed in the Rules, closure happens immediately and without a prior warning.

If we close your account for a breach, we do not refund a running subscription month. If we close or suspend your account for a reason that is not your fault, for example because we stop offering a feature, we refund the unused part.

If we ever shut TheFakto down, we will give you notice and a reasonable window to download your content, and we will refund the unused part of any subscription.

15. Complaints, disputes and the law

Come to us first: honzastegner19@gmail.com. Most things are a misunderstanding and get fixed in one message.

Content decisions. Appeal as described in section 6 and in the Rules. You always keep the right to go to court. Because we are a micro enterprise, Article 19 of the Digital Services Act means we are not required to run a formal internal complaint handling system or to use a certified out of court dispute settlement body. We are telling you that instead of pretending otherwise. The appeal route we do run is answered by a human.

Paid features. If you are a consumer and we cannot agree about a purchase, you can turn to the Czech Trade Inspection Authority, which handles out of court settlement of consumer disputes in the Czech Republic: Česká obchodní inspekce, coi.gov.cz/informace-o-adr. It is free for consumers, it is started with an online form on that page, and using it does not take away your right to go to court. You need to raise the problem with us first, and file within one year of doing so.

Data protection. Complaints about your personal data go to the Czech data protection authority, Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů, or to the authority in the country where you live. Details are in the Privacy Policy.

Supervision of the platform. Supervision under the Digital Services Act in the Czech Republic sits with the Czech Telecommunications Office, Český telekomunikační úřad, as Digital Services Coordinator (ctu.gov.cz). You can complain to it about how we run TheFakto. As a micro enterprise we are not required to publish our monthly user numbers, but if that authority or the European Commission asks us for the figure, Article 24(3) of the Digital Services Act requires us to give it to them without delay, and we will.

Governing law. These terms are governed by Czech law. If you are a consumer living in another EU country, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your own country, and you can bring a case before the courts where you live.

16. Changes to these terms

We can change these terms, for example when we add a feature, when the law changes, or when something here turns out to be unclear. For important changes we tell you at least 15 days in advance, by e mail or in the app, and we change the date at the top of this page. If you do not accept a change, you can delete your account before it takes effect. Continuing to use TheFakto after the change means you accept the new version.

17. The small print that is actually small

If one part of these terms turns out to be invalid, the rest stays in force. Not enforcing a rule once does not mean we give it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anybody else. We may transfer ours if the operation of TheFakto moves to a company, and we will tell you if that happens.

These terms exist in English and are translated into other languages for your convenience. If a translation and the English version disagree, the English version decides.