Robyn Craigie is all for ecological protection — and for people following Metro Vancouver’s tough new ban on sprinkling their lawns.

Like many of us, the urban studies masters student at Simon Fraser University can see the value in wealthy homeowners in places like Beverly Hills or Vancouver’s Kerrisdale being publicly “drought-shamed” for sprinkling their verdantly green lawns.

But Craigie is also thinking deeper about online shaming. For instance, since he “totally agrees” with people who oppose “slut-shaming,” in which women are publicly criticized online for dressing in sexy or revealing manners, he is wondering in general about the ethics of humiliation.

“When is it OK to use shame?” Craigie asks. “Is it just right or wrong depending on who we shame?”

In this Internet age, public shaming seems like the new normal. Men and women sitting behind computer screens, often anonymously, use the World Wide Web to ridicule miscreants, ideological opponents or individuals they just don’t happen to like that particular day.

Often the cause seems right, as with the photographic exposure that goes on online via #droughtshaming, which is a popular hashtag in Metro Vancouver, along with #grassholes.

In Brazil, in addition, activists are targeting drivers who park in spots for the disabled, ridiculing them with colourful YouTube videos that go viral. In the Philippines, activists are “paint-shaming” shanty homes of people charged with dealing drugs.

But shaming can go easily off the rails. A B.C. news website this month posted a video of a man ranting at someone wanting to protect a pet from heat exposure in a car. The website took down the contempt-provoking video when editors realized the man was mentally ill.

Another online shaming episode in Ontario escalated this month into a harassment case. Postmedia columnist Christie Blatchford has described the complications that ensued after a group of female students tried to silence a critic by publicly attempting via the Internet to destroy his reputation.

The World Wide Web is giving billions of people a powerful new weapon for shaming. But how far removed is what they do from the kind of shaming that went on in olden days, and which still exists in some places, where people are disgraced for being homosexual or not covering their hair with a scarf?

Typically, people in the West condemn shaming. As Craigie notes, they often associate it with bullying, which some define as an attempt to make people feel worthless merely for being different.

Psychologists say shame is a most insidious emotion. It is a sense of inadequacy, often caused by abuse. It is the feeling not only that “I did something bad,” but “I am bad.” It’s not necessarily simple to make a distinction between feelings of shame caused privately or publicly.

Another downside of online shaming is that it gives a lot of power to people who have a need to morally posture.

It’s easy to imagine how individuals who get a charge out of shaming someone else could be falling into the psychological trap of projecting their own unacknowledged ethical failings onto others. Some call this hypocrisy.

In addition, public shaming has a vigilante quality. And vigilantes often make mistakes — whether they’re 19th-century Southern U.S. mobs tar-feathering black “thieves” or self-righteous online news media commenters abusively “trolling” opponents with blindly ignorant barrages.