Someone had to tell The Knot and Pinterest not to promote plantation weddings
In this, the year 2019, two wildly popular wedding planning sites have vowed to adjust their policies surrounding the promotion of former slave plantations as wedding venues, a thing they needed to be told to do rather than just, you know, knowing they probably shouldn’t allow that to be a thing. Buzzfeed News reports that Pinterest and The Knot Worldwide—the latter includes both The Knot and WeddingWire—each decided on the change after the civil rights organization Color Of Change put pressure on the sites to, in the common parlance, knock it the fuck off.
Representatives for the two companies told BuzzFeed about the proposed changes. The Knot’s plan involves “new guidelines to ensure wedding vendors on their websites don’t use language that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticizes Southern plantation history;” Chief Marketing Officer Dhanusha Sivajee told the outlet that plantations would still be eligible for placement among the wedding venue listings, but the guidelines would “ensure that wedding vendors aren’t referring to a history that includes slavery using language such as “elegant” or “charming.”
So, good note.
As for Pinterest:
A Pinterest spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company will restrict plantation wedding content on its website, and is working on de-indexing Google searches for plantation weddings on Pinterest. Though users can still search for it, they’ll see an advisory that some of that content may violate Pinterest’s policies.
“Weddings should be a symbol of love and unity. Plantations represent none of those things,” the Pinterest spokesperson wrote in an email. “We are working to limit the distribution of this content and accounts across our platform, and continue to not accept advertisements for them.”
For further details on how this civil rights organization convinced two corporations that romanticizing slavery is bad, see Buzzfeed’s reporting.
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