While Google had already agreed once to follow the new Trump administration in its grandiloquent delusions by agreeing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, now Google Calendar is getting in on the act.
In the Mountain View firm's community space, several users are worried about the disappearance of Pride Month (an event dedicated to the fight for LGBT+ rights) from the default events.
In addition to Pride Month, many other celebrations and commemorations dedicated to minorities have been removed from the events shown to users by default. This is the case for Black History Month, Indigenous Peoples Day, Native American History Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month.
A policy of what’s official
Some users go so far as to judge that the service is “used to capitulate to fascism”. A Google spokesperson responded to the criticism in the columns of The Verge with these words (machine translation via DeepL before proofreading):
Just like with the story of the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, Google is sticking to a policy of “we show what’s official.” Indeed, the condition for changing the name of the Gulf in Google Maps is that the official maps are modified.
For Calendar, Google invokes the same defense and prefers to stick to national holidays and events declared as such by the State.
It should be noted that the spokesperson also invokes a technical, even organizational reason. He suggests that the various events dedicated to minorities were added manually and that they took place on different dates in various countries around the world, making the process cumbersome and unreliable.
A presence at the inauguration ceremony
A defense that could be understood, if Google's support had not been so immediate with the new administration. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was indeed present in person at the Capitol's inauguration ceremony, alongside Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
In addition, Google, along with Microsoft, Toyota, Uber, Meta and Open Ai, donated $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration fund. Large companies seem particularly ready to try to curry favor with the new White House occupant. As The Guardian points out, the inauguration fund reached a record $170 million, compared to $63 million for Joe Biden in 2021.
Source: The Verge
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