Users of Google Calendar are expressing their dissatisfaction as significant events like Pride Month are no longer highlighted by default. Events such as Black History Month, Indigenous Peoples Month, Jewish Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month have also seen their default visibility removed, according to a Google product expert.
One frustrated user labeled the change as “shameful,” accusing the platform of “capitulating to fascism.” Over the past few years, there have been numerous comments and media reports addressing concerns about these acknowledgments, but now they have been eliminated.
Google acknowledged the alterations made to its default Calendar events but provided a different rationale for the changes. Madison Cushman Veld, a spokesperson for Google, shared the following explanation:
“For over a decade, we’ve collaborated with timeanddate.com to display public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, our Calendar team began manually adding a broader array of cultural moments across various countries. Feedback indicated that some events and countries were missing, and maintaining hundreds of moments worldwide consistently proved unsustainable. Therefore, in mid-2024, we reverted to showcasing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other significant occasions.”
Requests for comments from timeanddate.com have gone unanswered.
