A gate agent at United Airlines stopped two young girls from getting on a plane to Minneapolis with their family last week—because their leggings were deemed to be inappropriate attire.

More interestingly, people actually cared about this.

Maybe I’m being wildly insensitive and completely ignoring the staggering implications this has for women’s rights. Or maybe, I simply have all of the facts.

Here’s what the headlines did not include: the girls who endured this heinous change in wardrobe were United pass riders. According to united.com, pass riders are “United employees or their eligible dependents standing by on a space-available basis.” As pass riders, they are expected to adhere to a dress code because they are representatives of the company.

Bottom line: they were not regular passengers.

Something has to be said regarding the fact that they were children, but this is a simple case of how when a rule is to be applied it must be applied to everyone. That’s it. If they only applied the dress code to certain pass riders, they’d have a dress code with fifty addendums. Perhaps the less absurd way to go about this would be for people to follow rules.

I think the fact that something like this is making headlines is symptomatic of a larger issue. While social media can have its benefits, it is also a platform for anyone and everyone to get on their soap box and do a whole bunch of useless whining.

The internet offered no pictures of this incident actually occurring, so of course all we have to go on here are the tweets of one random person who has nothing to do with it. Solid source. In addition, none of the opinions of the people this actually happened to were anywhere to be found. I believe what we have here is non-news.