Abstract
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia has significantly impacted the ability of alternative media to report fairly on the situation in the country, pushing nearly all of them into exile. To engage with their audiences, these media outlets rely on various global platforms and social media, which makes them dependent on the technological affordances of these platforms—particularly those that affect their discoverability. Among these affordances, AI-based algorithms play a crucial role in shaping the visibility of alternative media outlets within Russia. This paper aims to examine this dependency on AI algorithms and how exiled media organizations are adapting to it. Using a series of 8 in-depth interviews and a politico-economic analysis, we demonstrate that these media outlets often resist the AI-based model of visibility by combining it with non-algorithmic, “traditional” methods of journalistic outreach: email newsletters, messaging apps, and the development of their own applications designed to bypass Russian government censorship.