Roger Waters says Facebook offered him a huge sum of money to use “Another Brick in the Wall” — which he refused.
The rock legend spoke recently at a forum on behalf of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. In a video shared by Mexico’s La Jornada from June 10, you can see Waters holding a piece of paper before the crowd.
“This is something that I actually put in my folder when I came out here today,” Waters tells the crowd. “You have no idea what it is – nobody does – because it arrived on the internet to me this morning. It’s a request for the rights to use my song, ‘Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2),’ in the making of a film to promote Instagram.”
“So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me – right, arrived this morning – with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and the answer is ‘f*ck you! No f*cking way!'”
Roger Waters takes issue with Facebook and Instagram’s platform censorship. He says he won’t allow his work to be used to help bolster a platform that already commands too much power.
“They want to use [my song] to make Facebook and Instagram even bigger and more powerful than it already is so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out to the general public,” Rogers says.
“It’s the insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything. So those of us who do have any power – and I do have a little bit in terms of control of the publishing of my songs I do anyway – So I will not be a party to this bullshit, Zuckerberg.”
Waters then spends a few minutes ripping into Zuckerberg personally, with an intense dislike. “You think, how did this little prick, who started off going, ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a 4 out of 5, she’s ugly, we’ll give her a 1.’ How the f*ck did he get any power in anything? And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”
Roger Waters has never shied away from controversial statements. During the election last year, he called Joe Biden a slimeball who couldn’t beat Trump. Earlier this year, he participated in a Live for Gaza live stream and called for the boycott of Israel.
Such language. My, oh my.