The Knot and Pinterest will no longer promote plantation wedding venues

Pinterest and The Knot Worldwide, widely known as major wedding planning websites, will no longer promote wedding venues and content that romanticize former slave plantations, according to BuzzFeed News.

BuzzFeed reports that The Knot Worldwide, which owns the Knot and WeddingWire, is working on new guidelines that would ensure wedding vendors on their websites don’t use 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,” Dhanusha Sivajee, chief marketing officer for The Knot, told the news outlet.

Sivajee noted that plantations will still be able to list themselves as venues and that the new guidelines will make sure the vendors aren’t referring to a history that includes slavery using language such as “elegant” or “charming.”

She added that the guidelines will apply to all wedding venues that list on the Knot websites, even if the former plantations have changed their names.

“You can imagine there could be former plantations that maybe have changed their names to manors or farms,” Sivajee said.

A Pinterest spokesperson told the news outlet that the company will begin restricting plantation wedding content on its website.

Additionally, Pinterest said it is working on de-indexing Google searches for plantation weddings on its site. Users who find plantations through search will see a notification that some of the content may violate Pinterest’s policies, according to BuzzFeed.

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

The change in policy from the prominent wedding venue platforms follows pressure from civil rights advocacy group Color of Change.

The group pushed the sites to stop promoting plantations that formerly had slaves as wedding venues altogether.

“Plantations are physical reminders of one of the most horrific human rights abuses the world has ever seen,” the letter said. “The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry,” the organization wrote to the Knot Worldwide executives in a letter obtained by BuzzFeed.

Sivajee said The Knot Worldwide is working with Color of Change to finalize the new guidelines, which should be released in the coming weeks.