Prince Harry naked pictures scandal: British media were banned from publishing the photos viewed by 68 million people online

Millions of people worldwide have been able to view the naked images of Prince Harry cavorting with girls in a Las Vegas hotel online, but the photographs have been banned in Britain by a furious Royal Family.

British newspapers and TV stations have been unable to show the pictures after Prince Harry’s father Prince Charles threatened legal action and St. James’s Palace warned that the pictures were a gross invasion of the young royal’s privacy.

Minutes after naked images of Prince Harry appeared on entertainment site TMZ, they were also available to millions of internet users around the world – including those in Britain.

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 4:30 p.m. (PST).

The pictures first appeared on TMZ, which is the second most popular entertainment news website in the U.S. and has an audience of more than 18.5 million on its own.

But within hours, they were also being shared on dozens other websites with a huge combined global reach.

Millions of people worldwide have been able to view the naked images of Prince Harry cavorting with girls in a Las Vegas hotel online

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.

Once Prince Harry had returned to the UK, lawyers for Prince Charles issued threats of legal action. Meanwhile, the pictures continued to be available online, making a mockery of British privacy laws.

Popular blogs picked up on the story and published the pictures within an hour of them appearing on TMZ.

NBC made a video report showing the photographs in the early hours on the East Coast and they were featured on magazine website The People.

The pictures 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 – quickly published the pictures and even in France, where privacy laws are strict, websites were displaying them.

Respected broadcasters such as CNN and Canada’s CBC news showed all or part of the pictures in broadcasts.

By late morning, the pictures were published by the LA Times and TIME websites, the Huffington Post, Australia’s Ninemsm and Powerfm, the Vancouver Sun in Canada and Jezebel, a popular celebrity news and gossip website which closely follows U.S. 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 530,000 had voted, with almost two-thirds opting for “awesome”.

All of these websites can be easily viewed in 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.

Meanwhile on Facebook, which has more than 900 million global users, the pictures were featuring on the newsfeeds of millions of British 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.

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