Coinciding with the arrival of Trump to the US Presidency, Google has removed default references to various cultural events from its calendar, as reported by AP. Among the censored days in its desktop and mobile applications are events like Gay Pride or Black History Month. Despite the recent controversy, Google states that the change was made mid-last year.
The California-based tech giant stated that it manually added "a broader set of cultural moments across many countries" over several years, complementing public holidays and national celebrations from timeanddate.com that have been used to populate Google Calendar for over a decade.
"Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently worldwide was not scalable or sustainable," Google said in a statement. "Therefore, in mid-2024, we reverted to displaying only timeanddate.com's public holidays and national celebrations worldwide, while allowing users to manually add other important moments."
Google did not provide a complete list of the cultural events added before last year's change that no longer appear by default today.
Aside from this calendar change, Google has also drawn attention for its recent decision to change the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali (the highest mountain peak in the US) on Google Maps, following President Donald Trump's orders.
"We have a long-standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources," Google stated last month. The company added that its maps will reflect any updates from the Geographic Names Information System, a database of over 1 million geographic features in the US.
Google confirmed on Monday that the name Gulf of America had taken effect. Google Maps users in the US now only see the name Gulf of America, while users in other countries see both names. Denali, which will be renamed McKinley, still appears on both Google Maps and the GNIS.
On Tuesday, both Apple and Microsoft's Bing also made the change from Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on their maps.
And the new names on Google Maps are not the only change the company has made following recent actions by the Trump administration. Last week, Google outlined plans to eliminate some of its diversity hiring goals, joining a growing list of US companies that have scaled back or ended their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Google's move came in response to an executive order aimed at pressuring government contractors to end DEI initiatives. As a federal contractor, Google stated it was evaluating necessary changes.