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Samuel Bestvater

Senior Data Scientist

Expertise:Data Labs

Samuel Bestvater is a senior data scientist on the Data Labs team at Pew Research Center, where he has studied a range of topics including social media usage by political figures as well as the general public; link rot and webpage deletion; and the geography of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Bestvater holds a PhD in Political Science and Social Data Analytics from the Pennsylvania State University, and has been interviewed by a variety of outlets, including Axios and Vox. Sam’s research has also appeared in several academic journals, including Political Analysis and Journal of Peace Research.

Publications

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  • report

    How much of the internet is written with AI?

    In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public for the first time. Less than four years later, around half of U.S. adults say they use AI chatbots, including 24% who say they use them daily. These tools’ ability to generate human-sounding text has led to concerns that increasing amounts of the content people see […]

  • report

    Religious Radio Across America

    Almost all U.S. adults live in range of a religious radio station, most commonly Christian radio. Stations tend to broadcast either mostly music or mostly talk.

  • report
    An image of someone using the TikTok app on their smartphone

    How U.S. Adults Use TikTok

    About half of all U.S. adults who use TikTok have never posted a video themselves. And the top 25% of U.S. adults on the site by posting volume produce 98% of all publicly accessible videos from this group. Users who have posted videos are generally more active on the platform than non-posters.

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    An image of A Black Lives Matter street sign in New York City depicting the names of Black victims of police violence.

    #BlackLivesMatter Turns 10

    More than 44 million #BlackLivesMatter tweets from nearly 10 million distinct users currently exist on Twitter today. Over half of all existing tweets that include the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag were posted from May to September 2020.