According to Yerlan Askarbekov, a Kazakh public relations professional who worked with both the British Council and the Kazakh government who wrote a piece for the BBC website in 2016, ten years after the film's release, many of his colleagues in the Kazakh media saw the character of Borat as a valuable PR opportunity. According to him some of the Kazakhs who were most upset by the film were students studying in the US and the UK, who understood the film's satirical intent but felt that their non-Kazakh peers were taking the film at face value as an accurate portrayal of the country. He suggested that interest in the character inside the country faded once Kazakhs grasped that the film was designed to "get an outsider's view of the US and reveal the prejudices of the Americans who Borat interacts with... functioning as a sort of 21st Century Alexis de Tocqueville".