An Augusta area construction company owner, legislator, and parent is leading the charge to create legislation to improve online safety, particularly for students.
S.D. Clifton Construction Company President/Rep.Rob Clifton (R-Dist.131) is holding a series of public hearings across Georgia to get input from parents, educators, and law enforcement.
Clifton told ABD, with three young children, his interest in online threats is the result of a podcast he listened to that detailed how sexual predators or bullies target children.
Clifton grew up playing video games, but they were self-contained and not connected to other users through the Internet. Today, he said, it is a different experience, and parents may not realize how exposed their child can be.
“I played games. They can play games. It’s no big deal,” he said. “That is not the case today, and the percentages and information we’re seeing are that you have a more than 50% chance of your child interacting, having some sort of unwanted sexual advance on them, and I can’t live with those numbers where they’re at right now.”
Among the speakers was Sgt. Terry Gore with the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office. He has been in law enforcement for 40 years, the last 17 with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s (GBI) Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.
He said predators are not reaching children only through online gaming or social media. There is a decentralized group that exists solely to prey on victims.
“This group here that I’m talking about, the 764 group, it’s a neo-Nazi, satanic group that is international,” he explained. “It started out with Order of Nine Angles, and it just keeps mutating every time someone gets caught. The FBI is working on more than 3,000 of these cases, so it’s been exponentially getting worse every single year, and our children are getting affected by it.”
Gore said members can use online gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft to initiate contact. He is currently working with 25 children, aged eight to 17, who have been impacted to do things from sending nude photos to self-harm, even suicide. Gore added, once a child has been identified, he sends them for treatment.
That is where Kari Viola-Brooke, executive director of Child Enrichment, Inc., enters the process. She said her center has made strides in helping victims of direct sexual abuse and teaching children about “stranger danger.”
“However, I don’t think we’ve caught up yet in the prevention world related to technology,” she said. “However, our office is also the place where kids are going to get that interview to talk about who this person is they met online. One of the things I would challenge you all to do as you’re making decisions on how to proceed going forward is we need to look at two things: One, prevention. But we also need to be educating parents on how to respond.”
Jarrod Williams, district attorney of the Augusta Judicial Circuit, told the panel of state officials that education should be the tool to police the platforms and systems that threaten children. But he added that being able to stop the predators through legal action is a vital component.
“It is imperative that if we are going to fight this, we use the law in ways that actually work,” he said. “I work in a system that sometimes overestimates what it can accomplish through deterrence, because many of the people that we’re dealing with and the individuals who are engaging in this activity online or profiting from it are outside the bounds of our jurisdiction.”
Clifton said he will use advice collected during the statewide public meetings to craft legislation for the 2027 Georgia Legislative session.
“I don’t think people understand how fast stuff like that happens, how smart these people are,” he said. “What we’re hearing and finding out about groups like 764 that have a 200-page manual that gives you step by step on how to encounter, how to build trust? How to gain a relationship to then, in a very quick moment, flip it and turn it into self-harm or worse.”
He said studies have found that a single predator can engage 250 children.
The final meeting is set for October in Savannah.
