Google and the Easter doodle, the story of a fake news that has been going on since 2018

On Easter Monday morning, Google ended at the top of the Italian Trend Topics on Twitter. It is the topic that is talked about the most and on which we chirp the most.

Why did it happen? For some new search function, for the arrival of a new smartphone from the Pixel family, for the integration of yet another artificial intelligence within any of its products? None of this: it happened for a doodle, and it’s the same thing that happened in 2019 and before that in 2018. It happened that many, many people are complaining that there wasn’t a doodle (what is it? ) to celebrate Easter and instead there were some for Ramadan and Hanukkah. Which is a lie though.

Google and the “plan to make Christianity disappear”

The tweets are all more or less of the same tenor: there are those who, like Jacopo Coghe, spokesman for the Pro Vita & Famiglia movement (which defends “the right of children to a father and a mother”), show the google homepage. it and underlines “This is how Google celebrates a holiday observed by 2.8 billion people” and many who in fact make comparisons with what would have happened on the occasion of Hanukkah, Ramadan, Trans Visibility Day and Gay Pride.

Again: there are those who bring up the woke ideology (a new keyword for post-Covid conspiracy theorists), those who argue that there would be a plan to “make Christianity disappear”, those who accuse Google of favoring the extinction of whites and those who chirps the inevitable “We will remember it”, followed by unrepeatable insults against homosexuals. And against the Mountain View company.

It happens on Twitter all over the West, with tweets in Italian but also in English, from more or less well-known exponents of the world of right-wing extremism and religious fundamentalism, only that it happens without any foundation of truth: it’s true that Google created a doodle for Pride and didn’t create one for Easter, but it’s false that it created one for Ramadan and Hanukkah. The difference is that the first is not a religious celebration while the others are. And it’s a fundamental difference: since 2000, Google hasn’t made doodles for religious holidays. None, of any kind.

The two lies about Ramadan and Hanukkah

The company confirmed this in 2018 to Fox News, which had then again raised the (alleged) case: “We have no doodles for religious holidays, which is in line with our current guidelines. There may be doodles for some non-religious celebrations derived from religious holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, the Holi Festival, and the December holiday period, but we don’t include religious images,” even in these cases.

As mentioned, it has been like this for 23 years: the last time Google celebrated Easter with a doodle was on April 23, 2000, with two caramelized eggs included in its logo.

What about the images shown on Twitter of doodles for Ramadan and Hanukkah? They are two fakes, as Snopes colleagues explained well in 2019. The one linked to the Islamic anniversary (seen here) it was part of a campaign set up in 2010 to get Google to create a Ramadan doodle. But that never happened. The alleged doodle dedicated to the Jewish celebration instead it is not a doodle but a decoration (see here), one of those images and gifs that Google creates and makes available to people, to download and use as they prefer. There are some for more or less all the main recurrences, without distinction.