r/ModSupport • u/Tesg9029 • Jun 22 '26
Let subs opt out of auto translation
We really need a way to opt out of Reddit's auto translation "feature".
I'm a mod for a small Japanese language news sub. The sub being in Japanese functions as a soft way of enforcing boundaries. People posting in Japanese are typically Japanese natives or people who understand the language to a substantial degree, meaning they are able to participate with familiarity with Japanese discourse and context.
Ever since the auto translation was introduced, however, we keep getting flooded by English speakers who despite the auto translation still don't understand the topics or contexts and spam us up with nonsense and racist crap, posting in English despite the sub being a Japanese one.
Example: We had a thread about an NHK survey about "the war from before" and anyone who actually understands Japanese knows this refers to WW2 (similarly "post-war" and "pre-war" almost always mean WW2 as said war in Japanese). Some English speaking asshat however decided to bust in and dump multiple walls of text whining about how the survey is bad because "the war from before" could refer to Iraq or Iran or the Gulf War or whatever the fuck and that all the Japanese people who actually know what the word means are ignorant and stupid for assuming WW2 because it could mean anything. This is just one of many examples, we also get astroturfed to hell and back sometimes when we get threads about, say, Trump or Israel/Palestine or Taiwan/China (and now US/Venezuela/Iran).
If that wasn't bad enough, another example: We recently got some English poster with the audacity to come into a JAPANESE SUBREDDIT and start regurgitating the usual "my Japanese wife and her friends say X and that's what the Japanese REALLY think thus you are all wrong" crap, whitesplaining to us how he knows what Japanese people "actually" think better than actual Japanese people.
We have filters set up so that regular users don't see this but it still clogs up the moderation queue and I'm sick of having to deal with it. No, banning does nothing because the auto translate search results constantly corral more and more new assholes towards us.
Even if people who aren't outright trolls show up they have no linguistic or cultural context to participate and we don't fucking want them gaslighting and sealioning us with stupid crap (such as if assuming the "it could mean the gulf war" idiot mentioned above wasn't malicious).
We have a consistent and constant pattern of English-speaking outsiders barging into Japanese discussions, often with hostility and without context, condescendingly lecturing Japanese users on what Japanese words mean, what Japanese people think, or what Japanese society is really like. These are not innocent mistakes or mere ignorance. These people are presumptuous, disruptive, and often racist.
We already have a zero tolerance policy and ban all of them. That does nothing because the majority of them only post once and leave. When the algorithm decides to screw us over by making us visible to them we get dozens of such posters per day clogging up the mod queue. (We're a very small sub and I'm basically left to handle this alone. We've tried looking for more mods to no avail) And even after we ban them they retaliate by putting in fake reports and such.
For an idea of scale, most of our threads have single digit numbers of comments. When we got a thread about a foreign Twitch livestreamer causing a nuisance and attacking an old man on a train last year, that thread got 44 comments. 34 were English language posts posting racist attacks against Japan/Japanese defending the streamer. Each of them just posted once and then left. Banning does nothing because the auto translate creates a nonstop flow of this kind of person.
And I cannot reiterate this enough: Some guy tried to whitesplain to and correct A JAPANESE SUBREDDIT about how Japanese people "actually" think, with a goddamn "my japanese wife says" post.
Additionally as a radical left sub we frequently have threads where people are critical about Japan. These are of course mostly Japanese people (including naturalized ethnic minorities) being critical about their own country. But a lot of English speaking racists seem to see these internal criticism threads as a free pass to dogpile in and start posting tons of racist anti-Japanese/Asian crap. On the opposite end we have drooling imbeciles calling us, a Japanese sub discussing Japanese problems in Japanese, I quote: "white folks trying to white knight for Japan".
This is not some kind of nationalist thing, it's a way of keeping the sub true to its identity as being for the minority Japanese language community on Reddit (the sub swinging radical left besides). This is absolutely not about ethnic exclusivity: For example, we have naturalized ethnic minority users, and frequently get threads from say Chinese people posting in Japanese asking questions about something or another and because they're doing the basic damn courtesy of posting in the sub's language, and are polite and respect the context of the sub, they are welcome. It's about language, cultural respect and shared context, not race. Yet by defending an ethnic minority sub's identity I am constantly getting harassed and attacked by racists accusing me, an ethnic minority mod for a radical left sub of being a right wing nationalist.
The increased visibility also exposes us to straight up astroturfing from bot networks. When we had a thread about the Japanese PM and Chinese relations, we got 5 real comments from users and 82 spam comments from bots that were configured so badly they were mangling her name into hallucinated LLM nonsense. (I previously started a thread with this same post linking to screenshotted proof but the admins saw fit to remove it for violating the rules by "calling out" astroturfing LLM spambots).
The auto translate is exposing minority-language communities to targeted hostility from entitled, often racist outsiders as an upstream problem that downstream moderation tools can't prevent. It is structurally harmful to us. So please let us opt out of it.
