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Pinterest And The Knot Will No Longer Promote Wedding Content That Glamorizes Slave Plantations

The two companies are working on guidelines to ensure they don’t promote wedding vendors that use language romanticizing Southern plantation history.

Pinterest and The Knot Worldwide are reportedly changing their policies to stop promoting wedding venues and content that romanticizes former slave plantations.

According to Buzzfeed News, The Knot Worldwide, which owns two of the country’s biggest online wedding planning platforms, The Knot and WeddingWire, is currently working on new guidelines to ensure wedding vendors on their websites cease from use of language that glorifies, celebrates or romanticizes Southern plantation history.

“We want to make sure we’re serving all our couples and that they don’t feel in any way discriminated against,” Chief Marketing Officer Dhanusha Sivajee told the website.

Plantations will still be able to list themselves as venues, but the guidelines are meant to confirm vendors aren’t referring to a history that includes slavery being described as “elegant” or “charming.”

Pinterest, according to a spokesperson, says the company will restrict plantation wedding content on its website and will be working on de-indexing Google searches for plantation weddings via Pinterest.

"Weddings should be a symbol of love and unity. Plantations represent none of those things," the Pinterest spokesperson told Buzzfeed. "We are working to limit the distribution of this content and accounts across our platform, and continue to not accept advertisements for them."

The wedding planning companies had been pressured by Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group, urging the companies to end promoting plantations that have a history of slavery altogether.

“The decision to glorify plantations as nostalgic sites of celebration is not an empowering one for the Black women and justice-minded people who use your site,” the organization wrote to The Knot Worldwide executives via a letter relayed by BuzzFeed.

“Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen," the letter continues. "The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry."

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