Why Did Roger Waters Block Facebook From Using Pink Floyd Track?
George Roger Waters is an English songwriter, singer, bassist, and composer. In 1965, he co-founded the progressive rock band named Pink Floyd. Waters initially served solely as the bassist, but following the departure of singer-songwriter Syd Barrett in 1968, he also became their lyricist, co-lead vocalist, and conceptual leader.
His band Pink Floyd has achieved international success with the concept albums The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall and many more. Soon enough the band had become one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful groups in popular music.
Recent news says that Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist who is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder, had sent out a letter to Roger Waters which offered him a huge amount of money in return of using one of Pink Floyd’s song which is a 1979 classic named Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 for an Instagram advertisement. To which Roger replied ‘F**k you. No f****in’ way.’ and he went on by saying that ‘And I only mention that because 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 bull****, Zuckerberg’.
It was pretty evident that he was angry at the founder of Facebook because he even accused the company that they are doing this for the growth of their company and ‘make Facebook and Instagram 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 into the general public so the general public can go, ‘What? No. No More.’
In April 2019, the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, was arrested at the London embassy and shortly after that it was announced that U.S. authorities had charged Julian for conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon.
And soon Assange was also charged by the U.S. for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010. However, this accusation raised a lot of questions about First Amendment protections and whether investigative journalists could also find themselves facing criminal charges at a further stage. Roger Waters himself had marched through central London to protest against the extradition of Assange to the USA.
He even called Mark Zuckerberg and idiot and commented on the FaceMash app which Mark made to rate the appearance of women. Roger said ‘How did this little p***k 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?And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world. ‘ Facebook chose not to provide any comments on this but it definitely has raised up a havoc in the media industry which Mark has to now face and tackle.
