March is the month of SXSW and although I’ve sadly never made it to this legendary music, media and tech festival, my social feeds are always full of SXSW commentary and content. My highlights from this year by a long mile are two female tech leaders: Jay Graber and Meredith Whittaker.
At a time when most of social media seems to be going down the pan, it’s a joy to see these two women championing fresh (but very different) approaches that protect the user and prioritise social good. While Graber is CEO at BlueSky (a social platform with around 33 million users), Whittaker is President of Signal (a messaging app with an estimated 40-70 million monthly users).
Both Graber and Whittaker argue that their apps are “billionaire proof”. Let’s hope so! If you feel like hearing something positive for a change, I can highly recommend both talks.
1. Jay Graber
In an engaging interview with journalist, Mike Masnick, Graber talked about putting power and choice back in the hands of the users. Notably, she wore a black t-shirt that openly trolled Mark Zuckerberg. The t-shirt bore a phrase in Latin which translates as “A world without caesars”. The t-shirt sold out in minutes after her talk.
Graber says that while BlueSky may be a profit-making company, it’s also one with a mission: “The core thing here is [to] build an open protocol…all the code is open source…you can run your own version of [BlueSky]…you can find alternatives…or…you can build them…even within the app you could uninstall [any] feed that [you didn’t like] and…choose another alternative…you could use a different app and still access the same [social] network.”
2. Meredith Whittaker
Speaking to longtime tech evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, Whittaker fiercely defends our right to privacy. I particularly love her continuing emphasis on the fact that we’re living in a world that we have created. Things never had to be this way. So much so, in fact, that we actually do have the power to change them.
Of course, using Signal over WhatsApp is just one obvious change we can make (it’s a slow process – I’m working on it)! Back in 2006, Twitter famously tripled its traffic from 20,000 to 60,000 tweets a day after people saw the new(ish) app demo’ed on screens at the SXSW festival. Watching Whittaker speak in 2025, it feels like many more might give Signal a try.
Whittaker is so committed to her own privacy that it’s virtually impossible to find any personal information about her on the open web. This is clearly strategic as she resigned from Google in 2019 after championing workers rights and has continued to speak out against the power of the big tech companies ever since. Given the current techno-political climate it makes sense for critics to protect themselves as much as possible.
Next time – in London!
This year SXSW is coming to London for the first time, so I guess I’ll finally be able to pop by. I’m looking forward to catching up with the UK’s female tech leaders – and if Graber or Whittaker manage to make it over, I’ll be first in line to hear them speak!
Jemima Gibbons
Ethnography, user research and digital strategy for purpose-led organisations. Author of Monkeys with Typewriters, featured by BBC Radio 5 and the London Evening Standard.
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