Attention allocation of twitter users in geopolitics

How people divide their attention across their friends can help to understand key issues in the realm of geopolitics. Such attention exploration allows us to compare people who focus a large portion of their attention on a small set of close friends with those disperse their attention more widely. Using 2.5 million twitter data written by 130 thousands users, we find the balance of attention is a relatively stable property of people across different modalities of interaction. It displays subtle variation across people with different characteristics and different modalities of interaction. Specifically, people's attention is more focused in mention interactions, while those active in socialization tend to allocate higher portion of total attention to their close friends. Besides external interactions, people's inner interests also affect their attention allocation. People spreading multiple memes tend to be focused, and those with more even distribution of memes are focused on their intimate friends. Finally, people's relationships also plays an important role in their attention allocation. People are more likely to focus their attention on those most like them, and this similarity sequentially enhances the intimate relationship between them.