[11][12] The database contains the names and biographical details of people who are thought to be detained in the camps.
[11][13] Gene Bunin is a Russian-American linguistic researcher, who lived in Xinjiang until 2018, when Chinese police forced him to leave.
He created the database to “have one place" to store detailed information of people interred in prison camps or disappeared after only "limited attempts" had been made to identify detainees.
[13] In January 2023, following a database's post on Twitter regarding the addition of a large number of police officers to its "Accountability" section, internet users noted that images of two of the Xinjiang police officers were those of Hong Kong actors Andy Lau Tak-wah and Chow Yun-fat.
Soon after it drew attention on social media, the Xinjiang Victims Database added a clarification[14] stating that the data were sourced from a file cache of an Urumqi database previously written about in The Intercept, with the police officers occasionally using avatars that were not photos of themselves, including that of Andy Lau, which had not been noticed by the database staff.