Rote collusion isn’t child protection: it’s anxious elites copying each other to keep their place in the pecking order.

We don’t have visionaries in charge of countries. If the world was a high school, politicians would be the kids copying their test answers from kids who looked smart, but had worse grades than they did.

This article in the Guardian says it all.

Talk about a manufactured crisis. You have homeless people on the streets, tens of thousands of people losing their jobs to C-Suite stagnation, but let’s pick on kids because they can’t vote or fight back.

This is what happens when cowards copy laws: they don’t fix reality, they choreograph dominance displays. Instead of confronting rigged housing markets, broken labour structures or their own technological illiteracy, they reach for the one lever that gives instant theatre – banning something for a group that can’t hit back. The Australia under‑16 ban is just the latest script: declare a moral panic, criminalize a space you don’t understand, and dare other countries to prove they’re “serious” by copying you.

What we have is rote collusion: one bully isolates and abuses a group they assume cannot fight back, and the other bullies who have no ideas of their own watch, then follow the same script. They look like they are in a conspiracy, but they are not; they are cheaters cribbing from someone else’s F‑worthy test paper. There is no research, no context, and no consideration of long‑term consequences.

Will the ban work? History already answered that question. Prohibition never stopped people who wanted to drink from drinking; it just warped the landscape around them. Every kind of law has been broken, in every era, and yet centuries later leaders still mindlessly follow the same archaic script and act shocked when human beings behave like human beings.

Instead of thinking about how to make social media more in tune with youth so they benefit even more from it, their only answer is to shut it off. That is just another way of saying, “I lack the foresight and intelligence to progress society, so I will sweep something I know nothing about under the rug.” It is a de facto admission of incompetence, and yet people keep going through the motions of voting in individuals who do not know what they are doing, but are narcissistic enough to want to rule over people who are smarter, but less brazen, than they are.

The ones hit hardest aren’t the golden‑child ‘screen addicts’ in parliamentary speeches, but the queer, remote, abused, bullied, and multilingual kids whose only real lifeline is the very space these cowards just criminalized.

Fortunately, even the kids have already called the bluff: most say they will keep using social media anyway, which means the only guaranteed outcome is more hypocrisy and more workarounds, not protection.

And more wasting taxpayers’ dollars.

When your leader copies ideas from other leaders, you don’t have a leader. You have a follower who defers to someone you didn’t vote for to alter the course of your life.