are you kidding me?

no?

It could range from literally anything to "yeah so wouldnt it be funny if we fed cats vegan food, lol that would be so silly" to "we should force feed every cat in the world a vegan diet"

There is VERY large difference between the two. Like i said, i wasn't there, i didn't read the thread, but it didn't sound super excessive. It seems like the current rule is they can talk about it in the explicit context of research and data, but that seems a little strict to me, as it ignores the philosophical, ethical, and moral implications of it, it's hard to determine whether that's something you should or shouldn't do if talking about it is literally banned.