North-south differences in short video comments of ice-snow tourism based on structural topic modeling：Taking TikTok as an example

Driven by the "Southward Expansion, Westward Outreach, and Eastward Advancement" strategy, China's ice-snow tourism industry has developed rapidly, gradually transforming from a regional activity into a nationwide consumption hot spot. Short-video platforms, as a core arena for shaping its image and carrying out targeted promotion, present a north-south regional cultural divergence in user comments that urgently requires in-depth research. This study employs the Structural Topic Model (STM) to analyze 218656 ice-snow tourism video comments collected from TikTok, incorporating the north-south China as a covariate. A total of 15 topics are extracted and further clustered into four core dimensions: project experience, initial impression, emotional resonance and tourist perceived value. By integrating sentiment analysis and the likelihood of receiving likes, the study quantifies the differentiation patterns between northern and southern users across comment topics. The results indicate that: (1) In terms of thematic distribution, southern users concentrate more on the "emotional resonance" and "initial impression" dimensions, emphasizing perceptual experience, whereas northern users focus more on "tourist perceived value" and "project experience", reflecting a rational-critical orientation. (2) Regarding emotional expression, southern users exhibit a more positive overall sentiment; northern users show negative sentiment in the "tourist perceived value" dimension, yet display more positive sentiment in videos with emotional appeal and without voiceover. (3) In terms of dissemination effect, southern comments receive higher likelihood of being liked across all dimensions, suggesting that their expressive style is more likely to trigger broad emotional resonance. By dissecting the north-south divergence in ice-snow tourism comments, the research deepens the understanding of cross-regional cultural interactions and the negotiation of consumption values, offering valuable references for formulating image‑promotion strategies and coordinated regional cultural communication in ice-snow tourism.