Roger Waters Says He Turned Down Facebook's Offer To Use His Song

This shouldn’t exactly be surprising for anyone who knows anything about Roger Waters and his politics, but the founding member of Pink Floyd reportedly told the press at a recent pro-Julian Assange event that Facebook offered him a fat check in exchange for using “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” in an Instagram ad and he turned them down.

“It arrived this morning, with an offer for a huge, huge amount of money,” he said at the event. “And the answer is, ‘Fuck you. No fuckin’ way.’”

“I only mention that because this is an insidious movement of them to take over absolutely everything,” Waters continued. “I will not be a party to this bullshit, [Mark] Zuckerberg.”

The musician also read from a letter that he says came from Facebook about the request. “We want to thank you for considering this project,” the letter read. “We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and so necessary today, which speaks to how timeless the work is.”

Waters also brought up Facebook’s early days as FaceMash, the problematic website Zuckerberg created in 2003 when he was still at Harvard to rate the looks of female students. “How did this little prick who started out as ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a four out of five, she’s ugly, we’ll give her a four out of five,’ how did we give him any power?” he asked. “And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world.”