Assessing Claims That Google Cut Pride Month, Other Celebrations From Its Calendar App

Several viral posts claim that Google removed cultural celebrations like Pride Month, Black History Month, and Indigenous People Month from its Google Calendar application and imply that it was in response to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. One post featured a screenshot of a post saying “JUST IN: Google officially removes Pride Month from its calendar app,” and the comment, “Damn are we winning or what.” A Threads user posted an image noting that “Google Calendar has removed key cultural events from their site,” and commented, “The new Google Calendar. Make America white again… in a country that was founded by immigrants.”

While it’s true that Google did remove some cultural observances from its Calendar app, the posts lack context. Google made the move before the election last year, citing business—not political—reasons.

According to a statement from Google provided to The Dispatch Fact Check, the business decided in mid-2024 to stop including broader cultural observances on its calendar application. Google Calendar had always shown public holidays and official national observances on its interface, but, over time, the Calendar team also began adding “a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world.” However, as the initiative grew, it became apparent that including cultural moments for every country across the world was not achievable. “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’s statement read. “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.”

Google emphasized that the decision was made last year and not influenced by pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives since the 2024 presidential election. “Contrary to some of the comments on social media, this was not something we did just this year,” the statement explained.

DEI has been in the crosshairs of public opinion in recent years, and pushback against it has accelerated since Donald Trump’s election victory. The Republican president has made curbing DEI a central element of his first month in office.

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