Armaan Ahmad, 9, had some suspicions about the Tooth Fairy, so he set up a sting operation.

When he recently lost a tooth, he hid it under his pillow for a few days to see if she would make the usual currency exchange. (Going rate in the Ahmad household is $1 per tooth.) When he discovered the tooth still under his pillow after three days of silence, he casually mentioned to his dad that he had lost a tooth at school.

His father walked right into the trap.

“Put it under your pillow and see if anything happens,” Fahd Ahmad, a Washington University pediatric emergency room doctor, told him. Normally, his son excitedly shares his dollar after such a visit, but Armaan was quiet for the next few days.

He was mulling over his original hypothesis. Could it be true? There was only one logical conclusion.

A few days later, he confronted his mother, Emily, a pediatric nurse practitioner.

“I know the Tooth Fairy isn’t real because I hid the tooth for three days and no money came,” he told her. The cash showed up after he informed his dad.

He demanded the truth about other mystical figures, too. “Is Santa real?” he asked her. She told him she definitely believes in the spirit of Santa.

His investigation had been sparked by a report in his school newspaper months ago. A classmate had submitted a picture of the Tooth Fairy, left by the fairy herself, according to the friend’s mom. The paper ran the photo.

Armaan suspected fake news.

“I got confused,” he said. “I didn’t think the Tooth Fairy would leave a picture of herself.” So, he decided that when he lost his next tooth, he would devise a plan to find out the truth. He said he left the tooth under his pillow for a few days because he wanted to give the alleged fairy more time and collect more evidence to support his case.

The Ahmads, who live in the St. Louis suburbs and celebrate both Muslim and Christian holiday traditions, want to keep the magic alive for their younger sons, ages 4 and 1, for as long as possible. When Ahmad heard the account from his wife, he was amazed by his son’s ingenuity and posted a tweet on a personal Twitter account.

It quickly went viral, with more than 500,000 likes. Predictably, people started arguing -- about their parenting choices, the validity of mythical childhood creatures and even questioning Armaan’s experiment design. Some argued that parents shouldn’t lie to their children about these sorts of things, saying that it affected their trust when they discovered certain myths were untrue.

Neil deGrasse Tyson said in a late-night television interview in 2016 that he and his wife did not try to convince their daughter that the Tooth Fairy was real. He argued that children use their imagination in pretend play where it’s appropriate, and adults shouldn’t perpetuate an elaborate hoax on their kids in the name of fun.

Ahmad, who is Muslim, didn’t grow up with imaginary gift-giving figures. “I don’t know if there are any long-term effects” from such traditions, he said. “Some people said, ‘It made me turn away from God and made me an atheist. Some have said it reaffirmed their faith.” His wife’s childhood did include those mythical figures, and she says she wasn’t upset when she learned the truth. It was simply part of the fun and magic of the holidays.

She wants to carry on the same traditions for her younger sons, as well. But when Armaan asked her directly and demanded the truth, she said she didn’t want to lie directly.

Ahmad, shocked by the viral reaction to his story, has enjoyed responding to as many tweets as he can and debating the merits of magical creatures like the Tooth Fairy. He admits he’s a bit embarrassed by how easily he was taken by his son’s investigation.

“I’m a clinical researcher,” Ahmad said. He should have noticed the change in behavior and reaction to the missing tooth. But, he’s impressed that his son was able to design and run an experiment and sit on the results until he was ready to test his conclusion.

“As a dad, I’m pretty blown away that he did this entirely on his own.”

Emily said she has asked her son not to share his experiment results with his younger brothers, who haven’t even started to lose their teeth yet, or with any of his classmates.

“Don’t take away their fun,” she said. “I think it’s part of the magic of childhood.”

Armaan told his mother that he wants to run a test on Santa and the Easter bunny next.

Chris O’Leary started to sweat in church as he and his family moved up the line of parents and kids waiting for a turn at the confessional. When they got to the head of the line, O’Leary was crying and trying not to pass out.

O’Leary’s panic attack hit as his son made his first confession, in 2002.

He wasn’t sure why, but he wondered if it had something to do with hazy memories from his childhood confessions. Three years later, in 2005, his daughter made her first confession. He had another panic attack.

O’Leary had talked to church officials in 2002, after the New York Times broke a story involving sexual abuse allegations against Father Leroy Valentine. Valentine had been a priest at O’Leary’s childhood parish until the Archdiocese of St. Louis began moving the priest around. The story revealed that in the late 1990s, the archdiocese had settled with three brothers who had accused Valentine of sexual abuse, paying them $20,000 each.

The Times story unsettled O’Leary; he wasn’t sure if his vague, uncomfortable memories of confession with Valentine meant something inappropriate had also happened to him. When he spoke to then-Bishop Timothy Dolan, the bishop reassured him that he was misreading the situations from decades ago.

O’Leary also sought clarity outside the church. “Are you sure this wasn’t a thing?” he asked a psychologist. She also told him he was misinterpreting his memories.

So O’Leary buried them.

Then, his life started falling apart.

His panic attacks got worse. He couldn’t concentrate at work, and lost his job as a process improvement analyst where he made $90,000 a year. He got diagnosed with ADHD and then Asperger’s. He withdrew from his marriage of 16 years, which ended in divorce.

“By 2011, I had lost everything,” O’Leary said. He had also begun to accept that something bad had happened to him during his years at Immacolata Catholic Church in Richmond Heights, Missouri. Something happened during face-to-face confession with Valentine when he was in grade school.

“My head would end up in his crotch,” O’Leary said.

He went back to the archdiocese in 2011, met with an investigatory review team and told them what he had remembered. Two months later, he says, Deacon Phil Hengen told him Valentine denied the allegations.

Then in 2013, the church permanently removed Valentine from the ministry, saying in a statement that a recent allegation of an incident in the 1970s was credible. When O’Leary read the reports about Valentine’s removal in the local paper, he had a mental breakdown.

“That absolutely destroyed me,” he said. For so long, he had questioned his own reality and sanity. He didn’t trust psychologists anymore. He didn’t have any faith left in the church. He had already lost his job and family. And he had finally remembered the worst thing of all: That day in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, where he had always had a blank spot in his memory, had come back to him.

“I’m at the door of the rectory. The west door. Trying to get out. My hand is on the handle of the storm door. On the left side of the door. It’s all I can see as I fumble with it, desperate to get outside,” he recently wrote, in a blog post describing being raped that day.

In October of 2015, he filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese. It was settled two years later, and he received $9,000 of a $15,000 settlement after lawyers’ fees. When asked to comment on O’Leary’s account, archdiocese spokesman Gabe Jones said in an email, “The archdiocese’s record of Mr. O’Leary’s allegations are significantly different; however, due to a court order as well as our own ethical obligation, we are not at liberty to discuss Mr. O’Leary’s case.” Jones also said the information O’Leary shared initially changed multiple times by the time he broke off communication with the archdiocese’s Office of Child and Youth Protection.

The settlement, which O’Leary says he accepted under pressure of a statute of limitations that would have negatively affected his case, has not healed any of O’Leary’s wounds. The money mostly went to medical bills and other debts.

O’Leary, now 50 and living in Webster Groves, Missouri, struggles to leave his house and makes a living selling e-books and DVDs about baseball pitching and hitting techniques. In addition to ADHD and Asperger’s, he has been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, OCD and complex PTSD, but he hasn’t been to a therapist in years because he says the church destroyed his trust in them.

He decided to talk publicly about his case because he doesn’t believe the church is sincere about helping sexual abuse survivors. He wants to warn other parents. He’s published a detailed account and timeline on his website.

“Eventually, I realized the archdiocese didn’t care about me or what happened to me,” he said.

It’s a ghost that has haunted him the past 16 years, ever since he first spoke to a church official. Perhaps he holds out hope that someone in the church might acknowledge how much he continues to suffer -- not just from four years of intermittent abuse, but also from 16 years of not being believed.

He still considers himself a Catholic.

But he doesn’t believe he will ever be able to step foot in a church again.

Mark Zuckerberg’s apologies are not enough.

Imagine a friend of a friend stalked your Facebook page. He saw that you had liked posts about cute puppies and that you’d joined a rescue group on the site. So, he started putting stories on your newsfeed about the puppy mill practices of the store where you normally buy dog food.

The images of abused dogs and heartbreaking stories convinced you to stop shopping there and switch to a different store.

But the store you left never did any of those terrible things. It was your stalker’s competitor, and he wanted to hurt their business. If I found out I had been targeted, lied to and manipulated like this, I would not settle for a contrite apology. And I wouldn’t expect the stalker to change his ways simply because he had been caught.

Now, what if that business had been a political candidate? And it was your vote that was influenced by lies?

That is the question Congress should be asking on behalf of 87 million Facebook users whose data was “scraped” by research firm Cambridge Analytica and used to help the Trump campaign. The burning question is no longer whether Facebook is turning us all into narcissists. As a country, we should be outraged that Facebook let “bad actors” feed us lies, weaken trust in our institutions and tear our civil discourse apart. To what extent has Facebook been complicit in subverting our democracy through fake news, Russian trolls and privacy breaches, and just as importantly, how do we prevent it from happening again?

More than questioning, we need Congress to propose legislation that protects us like the laws that European countries have enacted. American social media users should be able to decide to opt in if they want their data shared. The tech giant should be prohibited from tracking our online activity once we are logged out of the site. We should have disclosure about how our data is monetized and who buys access to it. It’s clearly not just advertisers who use this data to market to us. We should not have to wonder if our news feeds are filled with fake news or propaganda.

I received a Facebook notice that my information had been compromised -- by a friend logging into the “My Digital Life” quiz -- and shared with Cambridge Analytica. Now, I would like to believe that I am media-savvy enough to avoid falling for fake news planted in my feed. Likely, the vast majority of my “friends” are. But we are consumers being misled by a product. We all suffer the consequences in a democracy when people fall for misinformation.

You may be smart enough to spot propaganda -- this time. But what about when the tools of bad actors are sophisticated enough to exploit your values and interests? Broadcast television is regulated and has federal oversight. News organizations are liable for slander. A social networking behemoth with nearly 2 billion users, many of whom use it as a primary news source, holds outsize power to influence elections, public policies and consumer behavior. And yet it is subject to no similar oversight or regulation. Facebook is a publishing platform and should be treated as such.

My concerns about social media used to focus on the personal: the toll it takes on our mental health, productivity and social relationships. I also thought and wrote quite a bit about the political: the erosion of privacy and what it meant for our society and children. But that seemed like a battle lost in the court of public opinion. Millions of Americans willingly made the trade-off of giving up personal information for the habit-forming convenience of these platforms.

I was one of them.

Several years ago, I realized how we had lost control of our personal data and knew little of how it was being used to influence or impact our lives. So, I made a few changes in how I used social media. Mostly, I became a lot more cautious about sharing pictures or stories about my children, but I continued to log into Facebook and Twitter daily.

More recently, when a whistleblower revealed the enormity of the privacy scandal at Facebook, I decided to take a complete break. I also wanted to show my children, who use Instagram and Snapchat like most of their peers, that a social media detox is doable and can be beneficial.

I quickly realized how habit-forming these sites are, because I instinctively went to click on them anytime I was waiting -- in a line, in traffic, at a restaurant. I had to stop myself whenever I felt an inkling of boredom or when everyone around me was looking at their phones. The external validation through engagement on these platforms is brilliantly designed to make our brains crave it. It’s become a part of the culture of how we share our opinions and personal news.

A few days into my detox, Facebook started emailing me multiple times a day. The company tracks users’ time on its site carefully, and will aggressively try to lure you back once it notes a decline in use. Up to four times a day, Facebook sent emails about what I was missing. A friend just shared this, so-and-so just tagged you, you have so many unread messages. It felt like the manipulations of a desperate ex trying to win me back.

I stayed away from Facebook for eight days, and by the end was nervous about getting back on. Facebook tested my self-control and reinforced that it’s impossible to expect the company to act in the interest of its users. It’s a corporation that acts in the best interest of its investors. It’s too big, too invasive, too secretive, too profit-driven to care about what we lose in all this connection.

We’ve already sold our data to the devil.

We didn’t realize how steep the cost.