Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds's Wedding Is No Longer Pinterest-Friendly

The company is undergoing some important changes. 

Blake Lively Ryan Reynolds
Photo: Michael Simon/startraksphoto.com

Two of the top sites for wedding content and planning, Pinterest and The Knot, are making strides to kill an all-too-common trend in the industry: plantation weddings.

At the urging of civil rights advocacy group Color of Change, both companies are cracking down on the promotion of venues that once served as slave plantations. While The Knot hasn’t banned plantation venues from using the site, they’re creating new guidelines for how the venues are able to describe themselves. The Knot Worldwide chief marketing officer Dhanusha Sivajee told Buzzfeed News that under the company’s new guidelines, plantations (and even former plantations branding themselves as manors or farms) won’t be able to “use language that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticizes Southern plantation history.”

Pinterest is taking its reformation a step further and both restricting plantation wedding content and working to de-index Google searches. While you can still search for “plantation wedding” on the site, the page now includes a banner explaining that the content may violate the brand’s policies.

“Weddings should be a symbol of love and unity. Plantations represent none of those things," a 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."

While plantation weddings aren’t exactly a new craze, Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds certainly didn’t slow the trend when they famously wed at Charleston, South Carolina’s Boone Hall Plantation in 2012 (the venue was also featured in The Notebook).

Lively and Reynolds have been called out for their venue in the past, however they have yet to publicly address the backlash.

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