February 15, 2025
Google Calendar Users Noticed The Disappearance Of Black History Month, They Weren’t Happy
Although the tech giant removed the holidays from its calendar app, it will still track them via Google Doodles and other products.
During the week of Feb. 7, some users of Google’s Google Calendar service began noticing that the application no longer displayed observances of Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other special observances that it formerly observed in its calendar.
According to The New York Times, this, along with the company’s decision to go along with the ethnonationalism whims of the Trump administration and label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and the elimination of its diversity workforce goals from its website, seemed to signal to some that Google was abandoning its liberal viewpoints to embrace an ultra-conservative regime.
However, according to Madison Cushman Veld, a spokeswoman for the technology giant, Google’s decision to remove the observations happened last year and is more concerned with logistics than ideology.
According to Veld, Google concluded that manually maintaining hundreds of observations annually for different countries “wasn’t scalable or sustainable.”
However, Google’s explanation still seemed fishy to some, given that it had worked with timeanddate.com, a website displaying major celebrations around the world, to populate its calendar with public holidays and national observances like President’s Day and Labor Day.
Veld said that the additional dates the company was asked to mark were too many for them to accommodate. In addition to the two aforementioned observances, the days that are now unobserved include Hispanic Heritage Month, Pride Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“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,” Veld said in a statement.
In an update to its company blog posted on Feb. 12, following the considerable backlash from users, Google omitted the comments from Veld that indicated acknowledging global holidays wasn’t sustainable and instead sought to promote the service’s flexibility.
“Some important things to note: Showing public holidays and national observances, rather than a broader set of moments, is consistent with other major online calendar providers. Google Calendar is also customizable, so users can more easily add important moments to their calendar. As a company, we continue to celebrate and promote a variety of cultural moments across our products, visible to people everywhere — as you saw in the last few weeks with Black History Month and Lunar New Year,” the company wrote on its blog.
Although the technology giant removed the holidays from its calendar app, it will still track them via Google Doodles and other products, as the company alluded to in its blog post.
According to a post on the company’s blog highlighting Black History Month, YouTube Music, YouTube, Google Play, Google Arts & Culture, Google TV, and Chrome’s Black Artists Series would all be used by the company to celebrate Black History Month.
However, if you want to see Black History Month on your Google Calendar app, you’ll have to add it yourself.
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