During the last few years, several tourism destinations have faced different natural disasters, including cyclones, tsunamis and earthquakes. The transforming media landscape, including the use of social media, brings new possibilities and challenges of preparing and handling disasters. In the field of tourism geography, few studies have explored the use of social media in disaster situations. This paper puts focus on the tourists’ roles and participation in disasters and crisis communication, based on a case study from Fiji, following tropical cyclone Winston in February 2016. The study explores spatial and virtual dimensions of how disasters are handled, communicated and (de)constructed by tourists through social media by using the concept ‘tourism riskscapes’. In this context, tourists become not merely ‘victims’ by disaster events, but also powerful mediators in how the tourism destination is reshaped during a disaster, reflecting complex geographies of (im)mobility, (dis)connectedness, (un)control and inequalities. Thus, crucial questions include for what/whose purpose tourists use social media and if social media provides an arena for self-reflexivity among tourists, bringing ethical issues of tourists’ roles and impacts into focus in relation to other actors, including the local community. The paper has a qualitative netnographic approach, which involves studying social and cultural dimensions of online activities and how they relate and intersect with people’s everyday life. The netnographic fieldwork includes analysis of social media content (Tripadvisor and Facebook), interviews with Australian tourists who visited Fiji during and after the cyclone, as well as with hotels, resorts and tourism organisations in Fiji.