Google Calendar users have noticed that this year it has stopped automatically displaying events related to LGBT Pride, as well as Indigenous peoples, African American, Jewish and Latino heritage, and the Holocaust by default.
Google Calendar users have noticed that this year it has stopped automatically displaying events related to LGBT Pride, as well as Indigenous peoples, African American, Jewish and Latino heritage, and the Holocaust by default.
As The Verge reports, a number of users called the company’s move «shameful» and believe that the platform is thus approaching «capitulation to fascism.»
In turn, as the publication writes, Google confirmed that it had made changes to its default calendar events. But the company prepared a different justification for this move.
«For over a decade, we have been working with timeanddate.com to display public holidays and national celebrations in Google Calendar. A few years ago, the Calendar team began manually adding a broader set of cultural events in many countries around the world. At the same time, we received feedback that some other events and countries were missing, and supporting hundreds of these dates around the world manually is not scalable in the long term. So in mid-2024, we returned to globally displaying only public holidays and national holidays from timeanddate.com, while allowing users to manually add other important moments themselves,» the publication quotes Google spokeswoman Madison Cushman Weld as saying.
At the same time, this strangely coincides with how other digital platforms are changing their policies after President Donald Trump came to power.
Even Meta’s tolerant owner Mark Zuckerberg complained about the rise of «culturally neutered companies that seek to distance themselves from male energy.»
