Chrome extension scrubs Trump from the web

Americans tired of the media fixation on real estate mogul and presidential candidate Donald Trump have a new tool at their disposal, courtesy of a Brooklyn web developer.

The Trump Filter extension for Chrome, created by Rob Spectre and spotted by US News this week, will remove content on the web related to the Republican front-runner's candidacy. It includes three levels of sensitivity: “mild,” “aggressive,” and “vindictive.”

The extension, which was released last week, detected Trump-related headlines on a range of news sites and removed them when tested by The Hill. It also eliminated some non-Trump related content while on the "aggressive" setting.

Spectre said on his blog that the extension was based off of a similar project he worked on for scrubbing the web of any mention of another famous New Yorker: Derek Jeter.

He said that “a lot of the filtering techniques had to be adjusted for the problem domain — fortunately many journalism sites do leverage the semantic web in a way that makes the filtering quite a bit more precise. The ‘mild’ setting should be good enough for most use cases.”

On a page promoting the extension, Spectre said his motivations for creating the filter were simple.

“I am doing this out of a profound sense of annoyance and patriotic duty,” he said.

Trump remains at the top of national polls of the Republican field, though some have wondered whether his campaign is capable of converting passive support to votes.

His outsized persona and controversial comments have drawn wall-to-wall coverage from political reporters and frequently dominate the news cycle. He has called for measures to be put in place to block Muslims from entering the country, been accused of making sexist attacks against Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and famously launched his campaign with a speech in which he insinuated that many Mexican immigrants were rapists and other criminals.