Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Rümeysa_Öztürk

Using another pretext to target someone for their views is definitely a thing. This is not new (e.g., the Assange case) but its frequency is increasing.

I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.

The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.

In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.