Google calendar, one of the most widely used schedule management apps, has removed a number of diverse holiday markers, including Pride month. While Google has described the change as promoting “sustainable” operations, users have called out the company for apparently folding to the Trump administration.
According to The Verge, users began to notice subtle changes to their Google calendar earlier this month. Although there has been no official announcement from Google, a company product expert has confirmed that the app will no longer automatically mark holidays that celebrate diverse identities. In addition to Pride month, Black History Month (February), Indigenous Peoples Month (November), Jewish Heritage Month (May), Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) and Hispanic Heritage Month (October) have also been removed.
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The timing struck users as suspicious, considering this change comes just two weeks after Google announced an end to its DEI programs. And that purge came not long after Donald Trump’s inauguration.
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Despite this, Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld claimed that the election had nothing to do with the change. “For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar,” Veld said. “Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world.
“We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. 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.”
This explanation, however, hasn’t stopped users from lambasting the company for apparent cowardice. “Calendar used to capitulate to fascism,” read the title of a support thread (now “soft locked” from replies) users used to vent their frustration. “This is shameful,” the original poster wrote.
“These bootlickers have immediately shown us who they are,” said another user.
In addition to changing the Calendar app, Google has also updated its Maps app to label the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.” This time around, the company explained that the change was at the behest of Trump, who announced the new name within his many executive orders. Given that the gulf is an international body of water, the actual legality of the name change is suspect at best.
“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” Google explained on Twitter/X. “We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
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