Format problems. Any solutions?

I have a problem with the most recent part of my ongoing story. I use italics to write the direct thoughts of the POV characters which is something integral to my writing style. For those who don't know, in order to use italics on reddit you have to place a * on each side of the sentence that you want in italics.

However, with my most recent post, reddit has decided to add \'s next to every * in the edit page which for some reason negates the effect of the star. This has resulted in the story presenting sentences that are supposed to be in italics as just ordinary text inbetween *'s. The \'s are only visible in the editing page, not the post itself. Yet still the *'s are appearing in the actual post which is super annoying. I spent 5 minutes editing out all of the \'s on the editing page only for reddit to just add them all back in again once I was done, completely screwing it up.

Have any other writers encountered this problem? If so, how did you fix it if you did? Why is reddit even doing this? There is literally no reason.

I post on my phone, in case that's relevant.

Edit: The problem seems to be fixed for now after I went back and edited them out again but for all I know reddit could just decide to add screw it up agaon for no reason. So if anyone knows how to prevent this from happening in the future, I'd appreciate any advice.

Sidenote: I've noticed that the flair on my most recent story keeps changing from "Fiction" to "horror." Is this the mods doing this or is this another reddit glitch? If it's the mods changing it I have no problem with that as flair's need to be used correctly so I'm ok with it being changed if I've used the incorrect flair.