Users began noticing that Google Calendar removed some cultural events — like Holocaust Remembrance Day or Pride Month — typically listed as default items on Calendar. The tech giant said the changes were made last year.
Google has removed cultural events like Black History Month honoring African Americans as well as Pride Month from being listed as default holidays or national observances on Google Calendar.
Several other events and holidays like Women’s History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, National Hispanic Heritage Month and Indigenous People Month were also removed from Calendar.
Google has yet to list out the cultural events that it has removed. A spokesperson for the tech giant told the Associated Press agency that it first made the changes in the middle of 2024.
“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Google said in its statement to AP, adding: “So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”
It is not clear why the changes are being noticed now, but they come as tech companies publicly pull away from their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office, terminating “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”
Google officially switches to ‘Gulf of America’ in keeping with Trump directive
The news comes after Google officially updated the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” , following Trump’s directive to rename the gulf to include America’s name.
People in Mexico will still see “Gulf of Mexico” and users elsewhere will see both names appear on maps. Both Apple and Microsoft’s Bing have also made the switch from Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on their maps.
