Blake Lively And Ryan Reynolds’ Plantation Wedding Banned From Pinterest

Pinterest will stop promoting and romanticising former slave plantations

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds’ wedding is among the many images removed from Pinterest as the site bans the glorification of former slave plantations, often now used as wedding venues. Lively and Reynolds got married at Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston in 2012.

Plantations in the southern states of America typically used slaves to cultivate cotton, sugar and coffee among other produce.

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

Pinterest will restrict plantation content and is working on de-indexing Google searches for plantation weddings on Pinterest. The change was inspired by a letter from civil rights group Color of Change who urged the site to stop featuring plantations 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.”

Pinterest isn’t the only company to clamp down on such content. Wedding planning website Knot Worldwide, which runs the Knot and WeddingWire, will stop using language that glorifies, celebrates, or romanticises plantations, meaning that wedding vendors will no longer be able to refer to a history that includes slavery as “elegant” or “charming”.

From Harper’s Bazaar U.K.