Britt Peterson via BostonGlobe.com  from 2015:

‘IN RECENT MONTHS, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has used it; musician Buddy Guy has used it; Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson used it in grand jury testimony, as did his victim Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson. A friend used it in an instant message chat to me, describing her attitude toward her sick boyfriend: “i’m like STAY OVER THERE.” It’s called the “quotative like,” and over the last 25 years, it’s become one of our language’s most popular methods of talking about talking. The use of “I’m like” or “he was like” to introduce a quote, a thought, or a feeling has spread through English worldwide, from Jamaica to New Zealand.

One American dialect has rapidly adopted an even less by-the-book variation. In African American English, or AAE, a grammatically distinct variety, you can say not just “she was like,” but “she be like”—a version of “quotative like” with special powers of its own. At the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting this month, researchers Janneke Van Hofwegen of Stanford and Charlie Farrington of the University of Oregon presented a paper that found that “be like” is now so widely used it accounted for 20 percent of similar uses of the verb “be” among a group of young AAE speakers in North Carolina. An analogous group studied in the 1980s didn’t use the term at all….’