People outraged after discovering Google has removed key dates from calendar
Topics: Technology, US News, News, Donald Trump, Politics, LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter
Rhianna Benson
Featured Image Credit: Google Calendar
Topics: Technology, US News, News, Donald Trump, Politics, LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter
Millions of internet users have vowed to delete Google Calendars from their phones this week following the news that several poignant cultural and historical dates have been removed for 2025.
The likes of Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and Pride Month are no longer visible to users of the online and mobile app, prompted mass backlash around the world.
Prior to this week, the Google Calendar referenced all major global holidays and culturally/historically significant events.
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In past years, February and March have been marked by references of Black History Month and Women's History Month - but this year, there has been a major amendment by bosses.
The removal of these dates - as well as a handful of others centring on major societal milestones - was first reported by The Verge at the weekend (8 Feb), after which masses of users took to social media to express their shock.
"Google picking and choosing what matters now? This is a bad look," one hit out on X.
Another promised: "we will be using yahoo instead of this mess"
"Uninstalling the Google Calendar right away," a third pledged, as another noted: "so we’re going backwards???…."
"Aww come on @Google please change this back," one then begged. "It's such an important time that those holiday months should be acknowledged. Our government is trying to erase them please don't assist in this.
"I know logistically it might be difficult but this is important. Please reconsider."
The latter seems to be alluding to several changes made by Google since Republican leader Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of of the United States last month (20 Jan).
Bosses at the tech firm previously vowed to abide by Trump's wishes for the name of the Gulf of Mexico to be changed to the 'Gulf of America', and for Mount Denali - the US' highest mountain - to be renamed 'Mount McKinley'.
Both of these controversial requests have now been fulfilled for US-based users of Google Maps.
Now, it's Google Calendars that have made similar major changes by removing the likes of Pride Month, Black History Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish Heritage, Hispanic Heritage and Indigenous People Month.
In their response to Tyla's query on the matter, a spokesperson from Google made no recent references to the political changes in the US.
"For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar," they responded to Tyla. "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."