[eng] The perceptual and cognitive abilities of humans are not infinite but limited resources [1],[2]. Today, the widespread use of social media has intensified the competition among ideas for our finite attention. There is a competition for visibility
among actors (institutions or individuals) and among ideas; and at the same time
the social stimulus of visibility leads to a mutualistic interaction of actors (individuals, institutions etc.) with specific memes that strive for the virality of their
messages. Using an analogy between informational and ecological ecosystems, previous studies [3] were able to indicate that contents are driven by selective pressure,
i.e. the chances to persist and reach widely are tightly subject to changes in the
communication environment. Following this analogy, the presented work is aiming
at reproducing trends regarding meme dynamics that were found in a Twitter data
analysis. For this, an ecology-inspired modelling framework [4] is proposed and modified by introducing speciation, a data-based choice of the growth rate and intrinsic
(dis-)advantages for different species. With the named modifications, the presented
new framework, built on the main driving factors - competition, mutualism and
environment -, is able to reproduce some of the empirically found behaviours and
trends. The empirical foundation of the presented work is a big data analysis on
Tweets that include more than 220 million hashtags, representing memes. It brought
to light interesting patterns and behaviours regarding the creation and extinction
of different memes during external events.