Well, no - not silica free, since SiO is still the bulk of the volume. It should probably be dust free, though. If it’s “natural” sand it’ll have a reasonable grain size as is, but if it’s from a rock crusher there will be a fair bit of silica dust unless they’ve done extra work to remove it.
Historically, this wasn’t important, since most sand was dredged and mined. It’s a fairly modern change that most commercially available sand is from crushing rocks.
