The tweet I chose to analyze was this one by Ben Shapiro.

This tweet was a response to Senator Booker’s line of questioning during a Senate hearing to confirm a judge. During the hearing, Booker asked the nominee if they thought interracial and homosexual marriages were a sin. This tweet is obviously name-calling and does little in the way of establishing an argument. Shapiro is attacking Booker’s ethos here by claiming that he is an anti-religious bigot, which is implied through the tweet that this makes him unqualified to serve on the Judiciary Committee.

The kairos here is pretty plain. The hearing happened today, so Shapiro is capitalizing on this by tweeting about it today. Booker also recently announced his presidential campaign, so this tweet could’ve planned for a time when Booker was in the headlines such as now.

Most of the responses do not try to make concrete arguments against Shapiro’s tweet. Most of them also do not discuss Booker, but rather focus on the anti-religion idea. Many of the responses refuted that being anti-religion is a negative thing. These responses usually divulged into arguments about if religion is beneficial or not, and if religious people are oppressed. Some tweets did use logos by stating Booker’s credentials.

Overall, the tweet was posted to create this angry fervor in the comments. It is an attack at Booker, so most of the response chains turn into attacks of some sort. Twitter responses are not written to start a dialogue though, but rather to assert one's own opinion. We can’t refer to Twitter as one “public sphere”, because there are thousands of different communities within Twitter that do not interact with one another. They are echo chambers that occasionally clash to have yelling matches over the internet.