Two of the biggest U.S. wedding websites — The Knot and Pinterest — are taking a step into the 21st century and embracing a policy to stop promoting wedding venues that had once been slave plantations to avoid glamorizing the past.
Grasping that some couples may feel discriminated against by content that discusses ex-plantations in glowing terms, the companies are rewriting their policies regarding plantations as wedding sites. The Knot Worldwide, which also owns WeddingWire, is developing guidelines to make sure nothing on their sites romanticizes plantation history, Chief Marketing Officer Dhanusha Sivajee told BuzzFeed News.
Pinterest is doing pretty much the same as well as seeking to scrub Google searches for Pinterest plantation weddings, a spokesman told BuzzFeed.
Color of Change, a civil rights group, had submitted emails to the companies seeking to discuss the issue. The group’s president, Rashad Robinson, told the New York Times that his group found it “outrageous” that the wedding industry was making money by promoting sites that once hosted human atrocities. The NYT also reported that Brides magazine will also stop promoting former plantations.
Social media sites have been under fire for publishing fake news, hate news, bullying videos, murder videos and other troubling, distasteful content. Pinterest has sought to distance itself from other platforms with socially-conscious efforts such as fighting vaccine misinformation and introducing skin-tone sensitive search results.
- The Knot expects to release a new policy in the next few weeks, Sivajee 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,” Pinterest told Buzzfeed.
