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I clearly remember 12 year olds who were active on LiveJournal and a couple other less known social networking sites back in 2002-2003. The only difference it was done via a desktop computer rather than an iPhone.

Yep, millennial teenagers in my area were all over LiveJournal/Myspace/Xanga in the early aughts.

And if one considers messengers like ICQ/AIM (or even IRC) as a form of social media then teenagers were commonly (in my area) using social media in the late 90s.

I'm 30 and I was on social media, just with school internet and not a smartphone.

I think the author is talking about scale. There were definitely kids with social medial accounts 15 years ago. But very few of them had personal smart phones that they could use in bed at 3am.

Most definitions of Generation Z would include both those who are presently 25 and 14 years old.

This is true so long as you consider Gen Alpha a subset of Gen Z