CEO says Facebook will prevent candidates from 'prematurely declaring victory' on election night

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that its platform would prevent candidates for elected office from "prematurely declaring victory" on election night.

"We have a policy in place that prevents any candidate or campaign from prematurely declaring victory or trying to delegitimize the result of the election and what we will do in that case is we will append some factual information to a post that is trying to do that," he said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing with the CEOs of Twitter and Google on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

"If one of the candidates tries to prematurely declare victory or cite an incorrect result, we have a precaution that we have built in to put at the top of the Facebook app for everyone who signs in, in the U.S., information about the accurate U.S. election voting results," he added.

During the hearing, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked Zuckerberg a hypothetical question about President Trump’s social media activity. Markey asked if Facebook would remove a post on President Trump's page if he called for armed citizens to watch the polls on Nov. 3.

"Content like what you're saying would violate our voter suppression policies and would come down," he said in response.