Again with the lemmings (Edited)

A while back some woman who is apparently some sort of  internet personality or something created quite a firestorm over a couple of young girls who were prevented from boarding an airline flight because of their attire.  In the process, she attributed all sorts of nefarious motives to both the airline and the personnel who made the decision.  It was a vicious attack on women's rights, sexist, patriarchial, and lord knows what else.

Oh, I know what else.  It was wrong.

The girls were not flying on tickets that they'd bought on kayak, or travelocity or whatever, they were flying on passes of some sort.  What those in the industry refer to as "non-rev". 

Back in the day, when flying was a bigger deal than it is now, airline employees had what were called "flight privileges", essentially they and their immediate family were allowed to fly anywhere that airline flew for free (there was even some reciprocity between airlines).   These benefits were a pretty good deal, except for a couple of rules.

1.  You flew standby.  Not just standby, but the very lowest category of standby.  Behind the folks kicked off of overbooked flights, behind employees traveling on airline business, and if you were a dependent of an employee or on a guest pass behind any employees.  Not only that, but employees and guests were ranked by tenure within the company.

2.  You had to adhere to a detailed and relatively strict dress code.

In the case that sparked all this outrage, the girls had not adhered to the dress code.  That's it.  They were given a privilege, which came with a couple of responsibilities and they didn't hold up their end of the deal.  Certainly, you could argue that their parents should have known and helped them make appropriate clothing choices.  You could also argue that, unless this was their first non-rev flight, they should have known what the dress code was.

None of that really matters all that much, the bottom line is; one idiot with a twitter account saw something she didn't fully understand, decided to parade her ignorance to all her followers, decided to make up things she didn't know so it would get folks riled up, and because of that the lemmings of social media followed her right over a big cliff of stupidity.

One final thought.  Had this been framed as questioning the need for a non-rev dress code, that would have been somewhat reasonable.  Had this been framed as someone trying to understand what happened, that would have been somewhat reasonable. 

But, why be reasonable when you can use and embellish a random situation that you don't really understand as a way to drive up your twitter numbers and fire up a bunch of lemmings to advance your agenda.

EDIT

Apparently the  social media jackals are really after United, as the recent incident where a passenger was forcibly removed from a plane has been twisted as it has hit social media.  My three favorites are;
1.  Anyone who doesn't immediately attack UAL is a fascist.
2.  It was Chicago PD who removed the gentleman from the plane, not UAL employees.
3.  The fact that the entire planeload of folks would selfishly insist on keeping their seats so this guy wouldn't have had to get off just get a complete pass.

Jackals, lemmings, and hypocrites...