No, both can be right. Censorship can be ineffective, but circumventing it may still put your name on some list. And once you do get charged with something, that fact can easily come up.

Also, VPNs are usually leaky. You can trivially identify many protocols, even under encryption. There was some researcher recently (sorry, can't find the link) identifying which movie is being streamed over encrypted link. Some networks are better at injecting noise than others - Tor has some benefits here for example.