Google Calendar has wiped cultural events like Pride Month, Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hispanic Heritage, and others from millions of devices worldwide. Google Calendar is one of the most popular calendar services around, with more than 500 million people and support for 41 different languages.
The Californian company started to quietly remove several cultural events from its default holiday list last year. However, the shake-up was only recently spotted — and has drawn ire from some users.
The change will only impact Google Calendar users who rely on global default settings. Google has reverted to only displaying public holidays and national observances from its long-time data partner timeanddate.com.
Among the deleted events are Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage commemorations, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Indigenous People Month, Hispanic Heritage, Pride Month, and Black History Month.
The shake-up to Google's default calendar, which was only spotted in the last few days, has caused consternation with some Google Calendar users who have flooded support pages with complaints
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Since these changes were spotted, the U-turn from Google has triggered backlash from some Google Calendar users, with many flooding social media to express their disappointment. Users have accused the US search firm of "capitulating to fascism" and branded the change "shameful".
In response to the controversy, Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld spoke to The Verge about the decision: "For over a decade we've worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar.
"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."
Google encourages users to use the built-in feedback tool within Google Calendar to express views about these changes. The shake-up from the Californian firm comes amid sweeping changes across the US technology industry as several major companies have scaled back their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Meta, Intel, and PayPal all recently reduced their DEI schemes aimed at diversity hiring targets.
In its most recent earnings call, Amazon removed reference to "inclusion and diversity" from its report. For the last two years, the US online superstore had a paragraph dedicated to "human capital", stating: "As we strive to be Earth's best employer, we focus on investment and innovation, inclusion and diversity, safety, and engagement to hire and develop the best talent."
This mission statement is now gone. The company also cut a reference to a goal to "promote equity" in a sentence about continuing efforts to refine employee hiring and development.
In December, Amazon executive Candi Castleberry said in a letter to employees that it is "winding down outdated programs and materials" related to DEI by the end of 2024. As part of the change, individual groups would no longer be responsible for building programs and initiatives would be integrated into "existing processes."
Walt Disney published its most recent annual report in September, which removed all mentions of its "Reimagine Tomorrow" program, which was designed to be an online space for "amplifying underrepresented voices" featuring some of Disney's Diversity, Equality and Inclusion commitments and actions.
However, it added a DEI initiative to hire United States military veterans.
President Donald Trump and his administration have targeted Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies inside and outside the US government. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently sent a note to staff, stating the Justice Department would "investigate, eliminate, and penalise" illegal diversity programs in the private sector.
Although Google maintains that its decision to strip-out cultural events like Pride Month, Black History Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day was a practical decision due to the expanding list of these events becoming unmanageable, it's tough to see the move in isolation.
US President Donald J Trump has spoken-out about Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies inside and outside the US government in the first weeks of his second term
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Google Calendar users still have the option to manually add cultural events or any important moments that are personal to them within the digital calendar.
To add a new event to Google Calendar on your computer, head to calendar.google.com. In the top left corner, click Create Add. Add a description for your event.
If you want the event to take place at a certain time, alter the date and time. If it's an all-day event, click the checkbox beside All day. Click Save — and you're done.
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