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According to Google, these holidays no longer exist
Yesterday we told you that Google had followed the executive order signed by President Donald Trump giving the Gulf of Mexico a new name: Gulf of America. The change appeared on Google Maps yesterday in the U.S. In Mexico, the body of water is still listed as the Gulf of Mexico and everywhere else both names are shown with the Gulf of America in parenthesis. Google will also change the mountain in Alaska known as Denali back to its prior name, Mount McKinley.
While we noted that Apple Maps hadn't made the change yet, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today said that Apple will start changing the name to Gulf of America in the U.S. today with the new name set to appear in other countries soon. So far, Microsoft's Bing Maps and MapQuest have kept the Gulf of Mexico name. Now, with Trump trying to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the government and private business, cultural holidays are no longer to be celebrated and Google is playing along.
Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and Pride Month have been removed from the Google Calendar app. Google also erased Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. Google claims to have removed these holidays last year when it "standardized" its calendars to only include public holidays and national observances as classified by timeanddate.com.
Quote:
"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."-Google spokesman
On the support page, a Googler who is a "Platinum Product Expert" claims that Google removed the holidays to standardize the calendar around the globe. He writes:
- Holidays shown in Google Calendar are public holidays and national observances as classified by timeanddate.com.
- These public holidays and national observances were standardized in 2024 to provide people with a consistent experience across the globe.
- If you wish to include additional holidays or observances, you can subscribe to a third-party calendar, import a calendar event, or create a recurring event. Visit the Google Calendar Help Center for more details on how to subscribe to calendars or import events.
- To view a country’s holidays and national observances, visit the Time and Date website. To share feedback with Time and Date, please visit their site here.
And please do send feedback to Google directly through the Calendar as well, while it may seem like this goes nowhere, it is all read and popular requests are taken into consideration.
Are we pointed out yesterday, back in September, then-candidate Trump threatened to prosecute Google for Election Interference if he was re-elected to the White House. In addition, Google could be forced to divest some of its businesses by the DOJ for engaging in anti-competitive practices. The company probably feels that being on Trump's good side means that they might be able to get him to shut down any Justice Department action that would force Google to spin off its Search unit.
Google had a tough decision to make. Appease the president or anger many of its customers. It's obvious which way Google decided to go.
