“I am doing this out of a profound sense of annoyance and patriotic duty,” a certain “punk rock technologist” named Rob Spectre says on the homepage for the innovation he just brought to the web: a Chrome extension that filters Donald Trump related posts from people’s searches.
The Trump Filter is a very simple tool that instructs users to simply “install the Chrome extension,” “browse the Internet you love,” “adjust filter settings on the fly,” and “make America great again.” It promises that with the application of these filters, “Donald simply disappears from your view of every page,” in an attempt to make the media turn away from “this inveterate jackass.”
The upside is that it’d be an immediate fix for those of the mind that Trump thrives on controversy and that all coverage of him ultimately helps him. The only problem, of course, is that Trump’s supporters will surely have no reason to use such a filter, so the risk is splitting people into camps of support v. ignorance as opposed to support v. incredulity/anger/horror.
Luckily, there are varying degrees of filter — “mild,” “aggressive,” and “vindictive.” Since it’s undeniable that the amount of attention Trump gets seems to give him a disproportionate amount of power over the American psyche, a mild de-Trumping could be an effective way to balance the desire to shun Trump with the desire to stay in the know. Plus, one could always compartmentalize with a Trump-free Internet and an occasional visit to TV news to see what awful thing the Republican presidential hopeful(ly not) said most recently.
So, if you’re sick of posts like the one you just read, try the Trump Filter out here.
[Via The Hill]