I can confirm this. At some point before I was banned, chat was reorganized and new mods were brought in, among them a bunch of site staff; Harmony, Woedenaz, IHP, Aismallard, uraniumempire, and cadavercommander/Sludge Thompkins (who isn't site staff.)
After this point they started punishing way more people for very little infraction -- the phrase "negative value user" (I believe introduced by cadavercommander) was thrown around to justify getting back at people they generally disliked, believed to be future trouble, or had literally anything going against them. For instance, during the SCPedo scandal, an RPC user was perma-banned for saying "Bright was involved with certain things" [this is an exact quote, or close to it; look it up in chat] in response to someone asking what was the drama all about.
Some people (among them Rounderhouse) justified this change by claiming it'd improve chat quality to remove people before they did wrong. I have no exact quotes here, so feel free to disbelieve me.