The Internet has become a Wild West of hooligans apt to besmirch the name of anybody they don’t like, because they think they can get away with it under a cloak of anonymity, legal experts say.

“The real difficulties you are going to have is finding who are the John Does who are posting this stuff,” said Frank Snyder, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth.

Indeed, for a while, the anonymous posters could hide. They counted on Internet service providers to refuse to unmask them.

But now, courts are ordering that they be exposed, opening the way for defamation lawsuits. —Harassers in DFW are losing their online anonymity.