London: Minutes after naked images of Prince Harry appeared on an American website, they were also available to millions of internet users around the world – including in Britain.
According to the Daily Mail report, the two grainy pictures of the young royal cavorting with a naked woman in his Las Vegas hotel suite were published on the internet at around 12.30am British time – 4.30pm in California.
The pictures first appeared on TMZ, which is the second most popular entertainment news website in the US and has an audience of more than 18.5million on its own.
But within hours, they were also being shared on dozens other websites with a huge combined global reach.
By last night, a Google search for ‘Prince Harry Naked’ produced 68,300,000 results. A search for ‘Prince Harry Naked Pictures’ generated 25,800,000 results.
Yet despite the ease of finding them with a simple internet search, the photographs could not be used by British newspapers, radio or television stations after St James’s Palace warned that the Royal Family regarded the pictures as a gross invasion of the prince’s privacy.
Once Harry had returned to the UK, lawyers for his father Prince Charles issued threats of legal action. Meanwhile, the pictures continued to be available online, making a mockery of our privacy laws.
Popular American blogs including Rickey.org and NYDailynews.com picked up on the story and published the pictures within an hour of them appearing on TMZ.
By 8am in the UK, the American television network NBC had a video report showing the photographs and they were featured on magazine website The People.
The pictures also soon appeared on the Toronto Sun website in Canada, the Hindustan Times in India and the Daily Life in Australia.
Italian and Spanish websites – including Hot Magazine – had published the pictures yesterday afternoon, and even in France, where privacy laws are strict, websites were displaying them.
Respected broadcasters such as CNN in the United States and Canada’s CBC news showed all or part of the pictures in broadcasts.
And by late afternoon yesterday, the pictures had been published by America’s LA Times and TIME websites, the Huffington Post, Australia’s Ninemsm and Powerfm, the Vancouver Sun in Canada and Jezebel, a popular American celebrity news and gossip website which closely follows the US tabloids.
TMZ – the website which broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death – was even running a poll asking its viewers if Prince Harry was ‘awesome’ or ‘disgraceful’. More than 340,000 had voted, with almost two-thirds opting for ‘awesome’.
All of these websites can be easily viewed from within the UK, and many, such as the Huffington Post, TMZ and Jezebel, already have a loyal British audience.
Popular British political blogger Guido Fawkes also published the pictures with a boast about how newspapers were unable to do so.
And despite the efforts by the Royal Family to block publication of the pictures in the UK, they were printed in Northern Ireland after Ireland’s Evening Herald put one on their front page.
The paper is readily available north of the border. Meanwhile on Facebook, which has more than 900million global users, the pictures were featuring on the newsfeeds of millions of UK users as they were discussed and debated around the world.
And throughout yesterday the pictures were commented on and shared by millions of Twitter users meaning ‘Prince Harry’ was one of the ‘trends’, or most popular discussion topics, on the social network.
