Burgertory owner Hash Tayeh steps down as CEO
In an Instagram post on Wednesday night, Tayeh said the decision to step down as CEO of Burgertory and food and beverage company QSR Collective was not made lightly.
'The reality is, I've been subjected to targeted attacks, politically motivated smears, and ongoing harassment, not because of any wrongdoing, but because I've dared to speak out against injustice,' Tayeh wrote.
In April this year, police launched an investigation into an alleged threat by a defence contractor to bomb one of Tayeh's Burgertory outlets.
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The threat to 'park a couple of b0mb$' outside the hamburger restaurant in Tullamarine was allegedly made on LinkedIn and posted under the profile of army veteran-turned-defence industry expert Guy Langford.
In two separate incidents in 2023 and 2024, Tayeh's home and the now-closed Caulfield Burgertory outlet were firebombed.
Following the incidents, The Age revealed the alleged arsonist accused of firebombing the Burgertory restaurant told covert police officers the attack was linked to the conflict in the Middle East, contradicting authorities' repeated claims there was no racial, religious or political motive.
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University of Melbourne deputy head of school of computing and information systems Shaanan Cohney said large companies such as Meta had been using AI to identify accounts in breach of their guidelines for many years. "But what does change from time to time, though, is the specific AI techniques that they use," Dr Cohney said. "What these large platforms are doing behind the scenes is they're collecting a whole bunch of things called signals that might be an indicator that something is wrong or dangerous about an account. "Even if your account is innocent, but for some reason has a lot of these signals associated with it, it might be automatically picked up by one of these algorithms." Exactly what goes into the latest version of these algorithms, how they change and when they change are not known to the public. Dr Cohney said information like this was a "trade secret". "You could say that the public should have a right to know what's in these algorithms because it can impact people pretty deeply because of the way in which these platforms are integrated into our lives," he said. "But there is a legitimate counter to that. "The effectiveness of these technologies to identify harmful behaviour is partially predicated on the ability of these companies to keep the methods secret so people can't devise tricky ways to get around them." When it comes to appealing against a breach, Dr Cohney said major social media players had fairly opaque procedures for users which generally involved some sort of semi-automated process. "It would be a very, very large undertaking to require a large company like this to provide everyone with a human appeal," he said. Meta told the ABC it used a combination of people and technology to find and remove accounts that broke its rules. Ms Archer is relieved to be posting content on her original business account again. But the feeling of uncertainty that this could happen again remains. "The fear of losing it again still sits heavy," she said. "It's hard to fully relax when you've already seen how quickly it can be taken without warning. "I'm following the rules, as I have always done, and will be keeping my backup account I created just in case."
