Cultural Heritage Expression and Dissemination Mechanisms on Social Media: A Case Study of the Forbidden City

Social media has expanded the visibility of cultural heritage while also reshaping how heritage meanings are produced and interpreted. However, the relationship between the interpretive depth of heritage expression and platform visibility remains underexplored. Using Weibo posts on the Forbidden City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this study examines how heritage expressions differ in cultural depth and how cultural depth relates to platform engagement. The dataset encompasses everyday experiences, cultural interpretations, and public debates. An AI-assisted, multi-stage framework is applied, combining semantic embedding, unsupervised clustering, expression-type classification, LLM-based cultural depth assessment, and engagement analysis. Results show that “check-in” expressions dominated the discourse, accounting for an estimated 43.4% of posts. Cultural depth was mostly shallow, with over 98% of content estimated to fall in the lower depth ranges. However, descriptive engagement levels varied across cultural-depth categories. In design-weighted negative binomial models that included expression type, cultural depth was not significantly associated with likes, comments, or reposts. These findings challenge a simple opposition between shallow popularity and deep invisibility. Heritage visibility on social media is not determined by cultural depth alone, and the regression estimates should be interpreted as conditional associations within the sampled and observed data, potentially affected by unobserved confounding rather than as causal effects. This study provides a replicable framework for examining the relationship between cultural meaning and platform visibility in digital heritage communication, with implications for the interpretation and management of HULs.