What’s the greater evil in a global environment: spam or online censorship?

Let’s say you’re a freedom-embracing, open source-loving Westerner with a few hours on your fingertips. How do you share your values with Internet users who happen to reside in countries that heavily censor Web content?

Do you buy search terms and try to point people to proxy sites that will enable them to maneuver around censorship?

Or, perhaps you spam them with information that points them to proxy servers.

At Slashdot Cmdr Taco posts the question (originally posted by Bennet Haselton)

Is it OK to send unsolicited e-mail to users in China, Iran, and other censored countries, telling them about new proxy sites for getting around Internet censorship?

The answer, according to the Haselton, boils down to the following argument:

1. Spam is bad because the costs to society are greater than the benefits. This would not be the case if you were spamming to advertise something whose benefits were greater than the costs of the spam.

2. However, in a mostly-free country where your product is legal to sell, #1 should never be used to justify spamming, because if the benefits of your product are really greater than the costs of the advertising, you can pay for the advertising, add the costs on to the cost of the product, and still have benefits left over to split between the seller and the customer.

3. #2 is not true in non-free countries like China, in which case if a product conferred more benefits than the costs of the spam but was not legal to sell, it might be OK to spam it.