Comment by 1attice

There's this population-management strategy that involves giving people something useless but (emotionally or intellectually) difficult to do; it creates psychological buy-in with the stated objective.

We saw it a lot during the pandemic, between the time when we realized the pathogen was airborne and the time we stopped putting up hand sanitizer stations every few feet; and again, when we learned that perspex shields made airflow worse, not better, but kept them installed (and kept putting up more.)

You also see it in wartime a lot; e.g. the 'if you see something, say something' campaign after 9/11 mostly just got you put in touch with a very bored phone operator who filed your complaint with the ten thousand others that, let us be honest here, mostly amounted to, "I saw a brown person."

"There is nothing you can do" is anathema to any campaign.