Thinking in American

Editorial Assistant Anirudha Dash reports on the idea of “Thinking in American” as social media has become the second highest news source Australia wide, and the problems that come with it. 

TikTok and Instagram aren’t news apps, but they’ve become the main way people get their news. In between the array of different media on our timelines, politics slips in; Trump’s indictments, Roe v. Wade, etc.. American headlines arrive fast, framed for maximum attention and made widely accessible. By the time a story about Indigenous justice, housing or anything local surfaces, the feed has already buried it under the weight of American noise. 

The Digital News Report: Australia 2025 earlier this year revealed that for the first time, social media has overtaken online news websites as Australians’ main digital gateway to the news; 26% now name platforms like TikTok and Instagram as their primary source, compared to 23% for dedicated news sites. Television remains the top overall at 37%, but the direction is obvious for social media; the fastest growing news mediums are platforms that were never built for news. 

Unfortunately, these platforms are not neutral spaces. They are machines designed to capture attention and generate profit. In our heavily import-reliant media landscape, American media and content make up a large portion of the average Australian’s media diet. Naturally, the things that trend, loop, and repeat are overwhelmingly American. Renowned political economist Susan Strange points out in her work that so-called “multinational corporations” are not really “multi-national” in any balanced sense; calling themselves “multinational” gives the impression of a shared international ownership, but both in their inception and practice, these platforms are inextricably American companies, shaped by American politics, law, and culture. This is not a bad thing, but it is important to reflect on the social media platforms that are beginning to dominate news distribution, and to understand that they are not unbiased vehicles of information, but that each post has a source.  

When Facebook stripped Australian news from its platform in 2021 to resist regulation, it was seen as a show of power over a small market. When it banned Trump after January 6, it was understood as a cogent defence of democracy. On display in this contrast is the unequal weight non-USA nations hold in the so-called “multinational” company. American news, culture, and politics are often centred amongst our feeds both in Australia, and the world. Media scholar Herbert Schiller warned decades ago of a process of cultural imperialism where the US not only exports a vast sum of media products, news, and culture, but also exports the frameworks through which the rest of the world interprets politics. What looks like a borderless stream of content is in fact saturated with American assumptions and American priorities, and if this is the internet we are plugged into everyday, we may even be “thinking in American.”

Thinking in American shows up in subtle ways. Debates about free speech in Australia borrow the language of the US First Amendment, a law that doesn’t exist here. Discussions of reproductive rights are shaped by Roe v. Wade before they’re shaped by state and federal laws in Australia. US elections are treated like global sporting events, while Australian politics struggles to hold the same attention. Social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo also crossed borders as global flashpoints that helped amplify injustices already deeply rooted here. The American visibility might have given us a language, but the anger was always local. It’s hard not to notice the influence of American news and political discourse on our own.

Through social media, young Australians are plugged into global news, crises, and movements in ways previous generations were not. But mass absorption of American media can subtly bend our perception and warp our priorities. The idea of “Thinking American” can be explained by what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls the availability heuristic: what’s seen most feels the most important. Social media algorithms exploit this bias and push high engagement over all else, and in practice it means American debates trend louder than the Voice referendum, and Trump’s trials feel closer to home than climate policy in Canberra.

This does not mean what goes on in America is irrelevant to us. AUKUS, Pine Gap, trade ties, and watching American debates inevitably make their way here (in discourse and in policy) ensures that the decisions coming out of Washington do matter here, and can affect us. Social movements that start in the U.S. can open long overdue reckonings here in Australia. But, when US spectacle consistently overshadows local issues, we risk narrowing our political imagination. 

To think in American is to erode the capacity to look at what is right in front of us. If feeds are the front page of this generation, then those front pages are being written somewhere else. On par with our increasingly-digital media landscape is the increasing need of reflection on our political awareness, our news consumption, and the attention we pay to our material realities. The question is whether we can recentre Australian stories in our small corner of the digital world.