Why can I not protect a question?

Question

For all the other questions that I checked, I can protect them (20K rep privilege).

I wanted to protect this question (because the same user posted two racist answers within minutes of each other (both were promptly deleted - well done all!)) but there is no protect link for me¹:

Who is the first African/Black superhero?

Why do I not see a protect link? I'm using Windows 7 & Google Chrome.

Screenshots: this question, no protect link:

Question with protect link:

_{1 So I flagged it for the moderators to protect.}

Answer 1

Because it's too young:

Which questions can be protected?

Any question at least a day old can be protected and unprotected by users that have the privilege.

There was a feature-request put in to allow 15k+ users to protect young questions back in 2012, but nothing ever came of it; a similar request was posted in October 2015.

Answer 2

Questions have to be at least a day old before you can protect them.

Protection is mostly mean to prevent a flood of late poor quality answers, when the question may not otherwise be garnering a lot of attention. I assume that new questions are unprotectable because they expect people to be paying more attention to them.