Google Calendar removes events like Pride month, sparks user backlash
What's the story
Google Calendar is facing backlash for removing certain events from its default display.
These include Pride Month, Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage.
The removal of these important events has triggered a wave of criticism among users who have expressed their disappointment and frustration over the decision.
Over the last few years, there have been complaints and media reports about these notes' presence, but they have now been removed altogether.
Official statement
Google's response to the controversy
Responding to the backlash, Google has confirmed changes to its default Calendar events.
The tech giant said that these modifications were made because it was difficult to maintain a comprehensive and consistent global list of cultural moments.
"For over a decade we've worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar," Madison Cushman Veld, a spokesperson for Google, told The Verge.
Reasoning
Explanation for removing cultural events
Veld further explained that the Calendar team had begun manually adding a wider range of cultural moments from countries around the world.
However, since they received feedback about missing events and countries, and manually maintaining hundreds of moments globally proved unsustainable, they reverted to displaying only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com.
Google Calendar allows users to manually add other important moments.