On Thursday morning Twitter announced it would pause its verification process indefinitely. The move came amid an explosion of criticism over the social network’s decision to verify Jason Kessler, a white supremacist who organized the Unite the Right rally last August in Charlottesville that resulted in the death of counterprotester Heather Heyer.

A tweet from the company’s support account suggested that the verification scandal was a misunderstanding. “Verification was meant to authenticate identity & voice but it is interpreted as an endorsement or an indicator of importance.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized for the situation, adding, “We should’ve communicated faster on this (yesterday)” and noting that “we realized some time ago the system is broken and needs to be reconsidered. And we failed by not doing anything about it.”

Twitter users began protesting Kessler’s verification shortly after it became public. For critics of Twitter’s ongoing failure to effectively address the harassment that occurs on its platform, the move was viewed as yet another example that the social network is not taking the appropriate actions to police its platform. Optically, it suggested the opposite: that Twitter was conferring legitimacy and authority to a known white supremacist.