Pinterest and The Knot to End Promotion of Plantations as Wedding Venues

The two online media platforms first told BuzzFeed News their plans to rework the policies regarding former slave plantations.

Pinterest
Pinterest

Pinterest and The Knot announced that they will no longer promote southern plantations as wedding venues on their platforms. 

The two popular websites first told BuzzFeed News their plans to rework their policies regarding former slave plantations. The Knot Worldwide said they will no longer feature content from vendors that “romanticizes, glorifies, or celebrates” the plantations’ history. 

The news comes after Color of Change (COC), the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, wrote a letter to executives at both Pinterest and The Knot Worldwide, asking them to make changes on how they promote plantations that once had slaves. 

“The wedding industry routinely denies the violent conditions Black people faced under chattel slavery by promoting plantations as romantic places to marry,” said Jade Magnus Ogunnaike of COC. 
 

The Knot is a platform used to help connect people who are planning a wedding with vendors and other useful services. Chief Marketing Officer Dhanusha Sivajee told BuzzFeed News that they “want to make sure we’re serving all our couples and that they don’t feel in any way discriminated against.”

The new language guidelines that The Knot is currently working on would not allow plantations to be described as “elegant” or “charming,” adding that they’ll be vetting all event spaces and vendors.

As for Pinterest, the company says they’ll be working through their content to de-index plantation wedding searches from Google, and give a warning to users who search for plantation venues.

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

The Knot Worldwide says they plan to work with Color of Change on the new guidelines, which they expect to roll out within the next few weeks.

Plantation weddings are not a new phenomenon, and plantations have often been utilized as event spaces in recent years. But the concern about how history is being represented at these locations has been a topic of debate, with workers describing how some visitors question the severity of slavery on the plantations. Recently, tourists gave pushback about the topic of slavery being discussed while on a tour of the site that once housed slaves.